Can't access old data on external hard drive.

Question

Hello all,
I purchased my Macbook Pro about a year ago, and never really had any problems unless I was slow on updating. Well, I recently updated, and that's when everything went to pot. My computer became really slow - constantly giving me the spinning rainbow ball - and it would do this for up to an hour. I would have to keep manually shutting down and restarting. Then, it would show a loading bar when I tried to restart, but then it would just shut off completely by itself, without ever fully loading. I tried Safe Boot, but to no avail. After that, I attempted to boot from the Mac OSX Snow Leopard disc, but that didn't work either, because it said the disc was damaged when I did a disc repair. So, I did one the other options in disc utility: Restore. However, I did this on an external hard drive (1 TB, Western Digital) that I had just purchased after the Safe Boot failure because my 250 GB was too small for me to run Time Machine on. I placed the Macintosh HD as the source and the external hard drive as a recipient, for I had read that this works effectively in transferring files before erasing the hard drive. I then erased the internal hard drive, and booted from the disc, completely reinstalling the whole system.
My computer works just as smoothly as it did before all this happened, but now there's just one problem - I cannot access anything off of the external HD. I can see the music and video files that I used to have in iTunes, and they are .m4v, .mp3 and .m4p, but iTunes and Quicktime do not recognize them. If I double click on them, it says the files are not complete (as with the Applications on the external HD). I cannot find any of my old Word Documents or pictures, just music and movie files, and Applications. When I plug my external HD into my computer, it shows up as "Macintosh HD" and a notification that it cannot be changed and that it needs to be reformatted.
Is there no hope in recovering my old pictures and Word Documents? They were all on my first 250 GB hard drive, but I erased that in attempt to make more room for Time Machine.
Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

raneyeb wrote:
 They were all on my first 250 GB hard drive, but I erased that in attempt to make more room for Time Machine.
If you simply reformatted the drive, but didn't overwrite it with new data, there is a chance recovery software can recover your files.
You need something like DataRescue that reads the 1's and 0's of your files directly off the platters (not what anything else says) and you need another new drive to send those recovered files too when your doing it. (can't write to the same drive, it would overwrite the deleted data)
If you let TimeMachine use the drive, or you copied data onto it, or did a "Security Erase Option" then it's all gone, sorry.
Next time, once your all stable again, take a look at Carbon Copy Clone your entire boot drive (no filevault or bootcamp) to another HFS+ journaled formatted drive, it's hold option bootable and will save your bacon if a boot drive dies or if OS X gets hozed due to some unforseen software issue.
I maintain 2 clones, rotate them every few weeks, they get auto-upddated nightly.
TimeMachine I don't use, but if I did, it would be in addition to the two clones, as TM isn't bootable and is not quite reliable when you restore back from it sometimes.