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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Consumer Hardware & Components > External Hard Drive Woes

External Hard Drive Woes
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idyll
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Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Sarasota, Florida
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Oct 2, 2007, 05:13 PM
 
my external hard drive was working fine last night when i was watching a movie that was on it but when there were about 10 minutes left to go it suddenly stopped.

now my hard drive does not appear under "my computer" any more in windows xp, nor does it appear in disk management.

when i connect it to my mac it tells me that the disk cannot be read and i have several options (initialize / eject / etc.)... it shows up in disk utility and tells me that it is unformatted.

i purchased drive genius and made a duplicate copy of the hard drive. whenever i try to open the .dmg file, it tells me that the image file failed to mount because there are no mountable file systems? what does that mean?

if i try to format it in disk utility i get a input/output error.

if i try to format it in drive genius nothing happens.

when i tried to scan it for hardware problems in drive genius all of the blocks that were scanned were bad blocks.


what are my options? is the .dmg image i made usable?
     
peeb
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Oct 2, 2007, 07:37 PM
 
Well, it could be the enclosure, or the drive. First, you need to figure out which is faulty - can you swap the drive to another enclosure?
     
Veltliner
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Oct 2, 2007, 07:55 PM
 
When I had my failed partition attempt recently, I go the same "cannot read" message with the "initialize" option.

I chose initialize, but, then erased the drive. It was actually empty anyway, as you erase everything from a drive you partition.

Do you own Disc Warrior?
     
idyll  (op)
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Oct 2, 2007, 10:12 PM
 
Yep, tried DiskWarrior.. The hard drive does not show up AT ALL in DiskWarrior. What to do?
     
peeb
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Oct 3, 2007, 12:00 PM
 
Check the enclosure first.
     
idyll  (op)
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Oct 3, 2007, 12:16 PM
 
I'm starting to think it is the enclosure, unfortunately I do not have another enclosure I could try or a computer I could just drop the hard drive in to. I may consider buying a new enclosure
     
CharlesS
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Oct 3, 2007, 12:20 PM
 
If you take it to a local Mac shop, they might have an enclosure lying around that they can put the drive into for you and let you know if it's dead or not.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
   
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