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Unwell external HD

#DV: I've been thinking about what this disc has been doing. One thing (and it's a possibility it was the last thing it did before going "quiet" was I connected it to the TV at our holiday place to watch a film from it. Could this have corrupted it not being a kosher computer etc?
 
Nic Robinson said:
Sorry DV been tied up with other stuff. Here's the output (it is being seen):

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *4.0 TB disk3

1: Microsoft Reserved ⁨⁩ 134.2 MB disk3s1

2: Microsoft Basic Data ⁨⁩ 4.0 TB disk3s2
Click to expand...
Well your disk is alive! Does the orange icon appear on the desktop and can you open it (right click>Open)?

We can get more info with the diskutil info /dev/disk3 command. You will see a lot of info scrolling past and next you can save this in a file on your desktop with diskutil info /dev/disk3 > Desktop/diskinfo.txt. You should see this file appear on your desktop and you can read it by double clicking on it.

This sort of problem really needs the disk on the bench as then we see little clues along the way.

If at the end of the day we can't recover the disk data it can still be reformatted and used again. Its true that using forensic methods we could even with a reformatted disk recover data but its difficult and time consuming and the expert software that speeds things up is very spendy. This is the sort of thing that the police do to recover recriminating evidence! However they have the man power, tools and necessary resources.

Fun no?

DV

PS You may wish to try using Windows to see if the disk can be repaired see here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/chkdsk
 
Nic Robinson said:
#DV: I've been thinking about what this disc has been doing. One thing (and it's a possibility it was the last thing it did before going "quiet" was I connected it to the TV at our holiday place to watch a film from it. Could this have corrupted it not being a kosher computer etc?
Click to expand...
A TV USB port won't have the power output capability to run a hard drive
 
Nic Robinson said:
#DV: I've been thinking about what this disc has been doing. One thing (and it's a possibility it was the last thing it did before going "quiet" was I connected it to the TV at our holiday place to watch a film from it. Could this have corrupted it not being a kosher computer etc?
Click to expand...
Without having the disk in front of me I'd just be guessing. First when you open the disk on the desktop what happens? I'm thinking from what you have said that maybe the files have been deleted. But its a pure guess without further feedback. Go through what I have suggested so far and we'll have a better picture.

If the files have been deleted you may strike lucky with Recuva (free version) but its time consuming if there are thousands so you may just want to recover any important files that you didn't back up https://www.ccleaner.com/download

Cheers,

DV
 
Quick update,
I plugged it into my PC and after several times sending the machine into a spin, it showed up unmounted. I then ran Recuva, which saw it and declared there were no deleted files. Back to Explorer and...there it is, fully mounted and available as if nothing had happened!

I'm just copying some stuff off it and later will see if it works on my Macs. If it does, I think I might re-format anyway as it was clearly in trouble of some sort.

@DV was it something in Recuva that brought it back to life?

[Edit] It will mount on my Mac - but it won't mount automatically. I have to go into "NTFS for Mac" and instruct it to. It takes several minutes to come up. However everything is now safely backed up so all is well (not that there was anything important before as I said).

I think I might invest in another 4TB and copy everything on this one before re-formatting and mirroring back. You can't have too any backups and clearly something was wrong here and remains a bit iffy...
 
Last edited:
Nic Robinson said:
Quick update,
I plugged it into my PC and after several times sending the machine into a spin, it showed up unmounted. I then ran Recuva, which saw it and declared there were no deleted files. Back to Explorer and...there it is, fully mounted and available as if nothing had happened!

I'm just copying some stuff off it and later will see if it works on my Macs. If it does, I think I might re-format anyway as it was clearly in trouble of some sort.

@DV was it something in Recuva that brought it back to life?

[Edit] It will mount on my Mac - but it won't mount automatically. I have to go into "NTFS for Mac" and instruct it to. It takes several minutes to come up. However everything is now safely backed up so all is well (not that there was anything important before as I said).

I think I might invest in another 4TB and copy everything on this one before re-formatting and mirroring back. You can't have too any backups and clearly something was wrong here and remains a bit iffy...
Click to expand...
TBH I don't understand your words! First off macOS will read Windows NTFS natively - you don't need any add ons to do this. What macOS won't do is write to NTFS - I believe this to be a copyright/intellectual-property issue. I can write to an NTFS formatted disk by connecting the 2 computers Apple-Microsoft over my SOHO as the network file system interface at each end handles this issue. I do this all the time and have Linux/macOS/Windows systems exchanging info all the time. No extra software required.

Now the word 'mount'. In Windows a perfectly working disk will be detected by Disk Management although it may not be displayed. The reason is that Windows requires a drive letter to be associated with a disk partition before it will be displayed on the screen in file explorer and then allow access to the files. If it doesn't have one you can apply a drive letter with Disk Management that will be permanent until you deliberately remove it. You can even apply a letter to the EFI partition and you'll then be able to see and even manipulate it - don't!!!

With macOS instead of drive letters a named grey disk icon appears on the screen but only if you have selected this option in finder>preferences and tick hard disks - yes SSDs are called that! If you do this then even a USB NTFS disk will display as an orange portable disk icon and you'll be able to read the files natively in finder.

With large capacity mass storage devices there may be an initial delay before an icon or drive letter appears even in Linux. I guess that it takes time to read more stuff into the disk cache and do what the O/S needs to do before it is ready. Also some USB disks such as my 14TB WD Elements goes to sleep if it is not used for a while and needs a poke to wake it up.

I hope the above helps as it may be that your disk is O.K. but you might have accidentally changed a few things in your computers settings. However once backed up reinitialise your disk to GUID and format how you want - FAT32 is a universal standard but NTFS offers journalling and thats more secure (theoretically self healing) - and is accessible by all 3 O/S and only macOS won't natively write to it but will over a network connection.

Have fun,

DV
 
I hate external hds. They mostly have poor ventilation and the drive gets very hot though the plastic casing is cool to the touch, if used for any amount of time which doesn't bode well for longevity.
 
Darth Vader said:
TBH I don't understand your words! First off macOS will read Windows NTFS natively - you don't need any add ons to do this. What macOS won't do is write to NTFS - I believe this to be a copyright/intellectual-property issue. I can write to an NTFS formatted disk by connecting the 2 computers Apple-Microsoft over my SOHO as the network file system interface at each end handles this issue. I do this all the time and have Linux/macOS/Windows systems exchanging info all the time. No extra software required.

Now the word 'mount'. In Windows a perfectly working disk will be detected by Disk Management although it may not be displayed. The reason is that Windows requires a drive letter to be associated with a disk partition before it will be displayed on the screen in file explorer and then allow access to the files. If it doesn't have one you can apply a drive letter with Disk Management that will be permanent until you deliberately remove it. You can even apply a letter to the EFI partition and you'll then be able to see and even manipulate it - don't!!!

With macOS instead of drive letters a named grey disk icon appears on the screen but only if you have selected this option in finder>preferences and tick hard disks - yes SSDs are called that! If you do this then even a USB NTFS disk will display as an orange portable disk icon and you'll be able to read the files natively in finder.

With large capacity mass storage devices there may be an initial delay before an icon or drive letter appears even in Linux. I guess that it takes time to read more stuff into the disk cache and do what the O/S needs to do before it is ready. Also some USB disks such as my 14TB WD Elements goes to sleep if it is not used for a while and needs a poke to wake it up.

I hope the above helps as it may be that your disk is O.K. but you might have accidentally changed a few things in your computers settings. However once backed up reinitialise your disk to GUID and format how you want - FAT32 is a universal standard but NTFS offers journalling and thats more secure (theoretically self healing) - and is accessible by all 3 O/S and only macOS won't natively write to it but will over a network connection.

Have fun,

DV
Click to expand...
Sorry, Lewis. I'm not 100% conversant with all the disk protocols. All I know is, that, after running Recuva on the disk in question it was fully available to my PC and remains so.

On the one of my macs which has NTFS for Mac, even then it was still being detected but not mounting. The utility within NTFS for Mac for mounting a drive now manages to do so, but only after a delay. This wasn't possible prior to using Recuva on my PC.

So basically, since having Recuva look at the disk, it's mountable and fully working (albeit after a delay on the Mac). Clearly it's not 100% but at least I can get at it.

To be clear, I haven't changed anything in any of my computers' settings.

Cheers,

Nic.
 
Nic, is your NTFS for Mac up to date? I'm at v15.8.243. I remember having to contact support with copies of the original invoices in order to move my licences across to a new account in order to download an installer compatible with Big Sur.
 
s1h1 said:
Nic, is your NTFS for Mac up to date? I'm at v15.8.243. I remember having to contact support with copies of the original invoices in order to move my licences across to a new account in order to download an installer compatible with Big Sur.
Click to expand...
15.5.106 is what's on mine. Just did a "check for updates" and it said it's the latest! (I'm running Big Sur on this machine btw without issues that I can tell).
 
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