Dead External HD

Howdy!
ok, so i have this external hard drive that i have had just short of 2 years and all of a sudden it can't be read on my mac or my pc(i used to be able to switch it between the 2 no problem).
now i changed the casing and it showed up on my aunts pc, but it was taking a long time to access it it so i just ejected it and brought it home. both my mac and pc STILL don't recognize it, but my aunts did. i dont get it.
the only other thing i can think of is that the logic board is fried. but usually when that happens, you can hear it, and mine sounds like it's acting normal. and it can be read so i think there might be a different problem.
ok, i know all this info has nothing to do with macs, but here's my question:
is there anyway to search for a drive manually through mac like a pc can? since my aunts computer saw it, i wonder why the mac can't
thanks

Sounds like the Disk is pretty bad.
I use version 7 of this...
http://www.avanquest.com/USA/pc-tools/anti-virus-anti-spyware/antivirus-anti-vir us/SystemSuite_8Professional.html
But there are others...
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Best/xp-disk_repair.html
http://www.exefind.com/hard-disk-repair-tool/
http://search.techrepublic.com.com/search/disk+repair.html
thanks alot btw. i really appreciate this
Great, hope we can fix this!

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dead sata bridge card. very common problem.
see all about it here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
verify HD on another Mac however, if same, dead SATA card most likely

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Youll need another HD and format same in EXFAT for read/write from/to both PC and MAC, however if you plan on using time machine with your Mac, the drive will need to be formatted in Mac OSX ext. journlaed (HFS+).
Please specify what your "older machine" is?
You said---"but I have just tried to access my recovered HD on my old machine and I no longer can"
if your older machine is a Mac, then it is likely that the WD software in conjunction with Mavericks has caused data corrupted (as in the links mentioned above).
If your older machine IS a PC, then the HD has likely failed OR MORE likely the SATA bridge card has failed.
You said---has completly ruined 7 years of work
No, if the SATA bridge card failed (very common actually), then the HD is fine, see full info about that sort of failure here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD

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Hello, I brought a 1 TB WD external hard drive and formatted it to use with both my mac and windows. At first it was working perfectly but after around 1-2 weeks it suddenly stopped. Now it doesn't show up on a mac or windows. I can see it on my disk utility (mac) but when I try to repair it it says repair failed and when I tried to erase it to start again it said 'disk erase failed with the error: POSIX reports:the operation couldn't be completed input/output error' please say in just being an idiot and it can be resolved easily. Thank you in advance for any help given :)

only 2 possibilities, your HD is dead/ corrupt
OR you have a very common failure called a SATA bridge card failure.
read all about same here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
sounds like you have SATA card failure , read above link

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My WD external hard drive will not longer show up on my macbook pro. The light turns on and you can hear it running but it won't show up either in finder or in the disk utility. This happened a while ago but I really want to get all my photos off the hard drive. Is there anything I can do to get my computer to read it again or get my data off of it?
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dead sata bridge card. very common problem.
see all about it here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
verify HD on another Mac however, if same, dead SATA card most likely

I have all of my data from my old macbook pro in an external hard drive. Basically it's my old Macbook hard drive with external casing. It was working fine before when retrieving files using my new macbook air, now I can't access any files?

I can't access any of my files, photos, anything form my external hard drive... It worked before now when I plug it in the light comes on, but it doesn't even show up as an external drive, so I can't access anything, I'm worried I have lost everything...

Huge mistake was only having ONE copy of your data OFF computer,
most people do it, and its just horrible and the typical reason for serious data loss.
Likely you have a very common failure (extremely common actually) called SATA bridge card failure, which would be "good" news,
read about same here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
Never again let yourself have LESS than 2 copies of your important data off-computer, ever
1. verify the external HD doesnt show up on another Mac
if same, you have about a 8 in 10 chance its SATA card failure.......... easy to fix.
The great news at the end of the tunnel of an apparently failed or failing external hard drive.
When checked on another computer, and with no need for spending money on data extraction expertise or software, the very likely case is that your external USB or thunderbolt HD is in fact fine, and merely the card interface, or SATA bridge card has failed or is failing. Keeping a HD dock around handy, or cheaper still a $20 hard drive enclosure or a SATA to USB connector can be a real life saver in getting your drive back to use, when the drive itself is fine, and merely its interface card has gone bad.
The SATA bridge card inside a USB external HD has a very high failure rate in general
Typical SATA bridge cards as seen inside a 3.5" external HD with power input (#1), and 2.5" SATA cards (#3, #4, #5)
What are the realistic odds your HD is perfectly fine?
There are no hard facts whatsoever, especially since so many people discard their assumed “dead/faulty” hard drives, but a good educated conclusion from years of examining and seeing this issue is that for hard drives made since 2010, and not dropped or generally abused, is that a minimum of 50% conservatively are perfectly fine! I personally estimate however that it likely approaches 60%+.
Considering how many external hard drives ‘fail’ (rather the SATA bridge more than half the time) each day, that is a very high number of perfectly fine HD that are tossed!
This is especially common with 3.5” desktop HD that are connected 24/7 with power and see a lot of data transfer. People wrongly conclude that “X” mfg. just made a defective drive, when in fact their 3.5” drives inside the plastic enclosure is 100% fine. I have personally seen well over 200 of these dead SATA cards and additionally seen 3 fail within a one hour span of doing a large data copies.
One of the very reason pros use bare HD as inserted into HD docks is not just the saving of space and the need for endless USB cables, but the elimination of the need for this high failure-rate part.
While the shapes and sizes vary somewhat on SATA bridge cards, they all serve the same purpose and have likewise failure rates
What exactly is the SATA bridge card in your external HD?
In the middle to late of 2009, most all external hard drives both in 2.5” and 3.5” reached the shelves in SATA III. These small SATA cards or "bridges" are used to translate between the hard drives’ interfaces and the enclosures' external ports (USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire). Additionally these small bridges not only transfer power but also of course the data. Unfortunately these SATA bridge cards have a very high failure rate as they are burdened with shuffle power and data.
Literally these little unreliable and fragile cards are the power conduits and the nervous system for all external HD data transfer.
SATA card as found inside a typical USB external hard drive
The assumption that the hard drive is bad when its not!
Countless 1000s of good external hard drives are thrown away each year because the owner thought the HD was bad when it fact it was the SATA bridge card which had failed. This card is removed in a matter of mere second once an external USB HD is cracked open from its plastic casing to reveal the bare HD and the attached SATA card which attaches between the HD and the USB cable.
To complicate this problem, even many computer professionals do not know that there is a very easy solution to the “failing or dead HD” issue since the hard drive itself is very likely just fine. Its astonishing that so many highly educated computer repair persons are unaware of this high-failure part, but this is mostly due to the fact that they do not juggle 100s of hard drives and know that of the iceberg that is a “external hard drive failure”, the mostly unseen majority are not a HD failure at all, but a bridge card failure.
To add to this great misunderstanding is the fact that people assume that "likewise symptoms seen on an external HD are the same as seen on an internal HD, therefore also the external HD must be bad". This is a compositional fallacy of logic. Since internal HD do not have a SATA bridge interface, to conclude similar symptoms "indicate the same failure" is misplaced and incorrect.
This is all not to say that HD do not fail, they do indeed, and I have seen many 100s of dead and failing hard drives. Hard drives even under ideal conditions have a life expectancy of around 4-8 years due to ferromagnetic depolarization from entropy. But of the mountain of symptoms that are seen as “hard drive failures” in comments, posts, and hearsay, half or more of these are not a HD failure at all.
Once your rescued hard drive is removed from the bad SATA card
You have several options, but the purchase of a $20 HD enclosure is one option, another is having a HD dock, however this eliminates the former portability in a 2.5" small HD.
Remember that 3.5” HD require power, which means you need either a HD dock, or a powered SATA card kit as seen at top left in the picture below. 2.5” HD get power from the USB port itself.
Just remember that the serious downside to the low cost external HD enclosures is THEY TOO contain these SATA cards, and what is worse the cheap ones will fail, often, much quicker than the original factory one did! In which case it is recommended you buy a quality HD USB enclosure
Rescue tools to use with your extracted HD for data recovery

I have a 1TB WD external hard disk, which suddenly cannot be detected in my system. When i connect the hardisk to the macbook, the disk appears and immediately disconnects with the message "Disk not properly ejected". Any advice ?

I have a 1TB WD external hard disk, which suddenly cannot be detected in my system. When i connect the hardisk to the macbook, the disk appears and immediately disconnects with the message "Disk not properly ejected". Any advice ?

verify on another Mac if the same
WD is having issues with mavericks as you can see on the WD forum, did you install any WD software (never do that) when you connected the drive for the first time?
possible issue is a dead SATA bridge card or the new WD firmware w/ Mavericks.
SATA card issue
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
http://community.wd.com/t5/External-Drives-for-Mac/bd-p/passport_mac
verify on another Mac if all possible

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likely a dead SATA bridge card, very common
verify on another Mac however
Never again be in a position of a single backup of vital data. Ever.
see about your likely fault here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD

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PowerBook G3 Firewire/Pismo Mac OS X (10.2.x) 384 MB/400 MHZ/120 GB HD

Well, it has been several months since I first posted about this problem. In the last few months I have been waiting for my backorder of A/C adapter from Western Digital and in late January they informed me that the adapter I ordered is no longer available from Western Digital. So I went to eBay (which I should have done in the first place) and immediately found a replacement for my adapter. I ordered it and it came a week later. I plugged my supposedly dead external HD with the new adapter and guess what, it started spinning and mounted on my Pismo desktop. Then I rebooted my Pismo with the External HD and it was successful. All the files/folders and my 3000+ songs on iTunes were all there! Then I upgraded it to 10.3.9 and I have been using my External HD for a couple of weeks now without any problem.
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My external hard drive is possessed

Trying to restore my macbook pro from a time machine backup on an external hard drive, except I cannot access it. Disk Utility recognises it, except that it said 'some information was unavailable..' after trying to verify disk. How the **** do I fix this?!

Yes, some of use call that the "haunted hard drive syndrome" EXTREMELY likely a dead SATA card.
How appropriate you called it "possessed" ......the SATA bridge card exhibits "haunted" behavior.
Read all about it here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
verify your external HD on another Mac

My external hard drive is not recognized

I have the apple external disk drive. I have used it numerous times. I just plugged it in and the computer is not recognizing it. I have tried both USB ports. How can I fix this?

A: USB desktop or 2.5" port powered?
B: did you just install mavericks
C: DOES IT show in disk utility?
Can you confirm it on another Mac?
Apple doesnt make HD, what HD is it marked as?
Likely its a dead SATA bridge card, a very very common problem with USB and external HD
see here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
report back with more info

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What I've done so far:
-I've looked on the drive icon on my desktop and made sure it is empty.
-I ran a disk utility repair.
-I rebooted the computer.
Thanks for anything you can suggest!
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old 250GB ext. HD, likely dead SATA card, or the HD is kaput
verify on another Mac,
verify on other USB port
see here:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
Purchase a new ext. 1TB HD, stay away from WD drives.

MacBook Pro won't recognize 1TB external drive

Hey team,
My mid-2010 MacBook Pro won't recognize my WD My Passport 1TB drive. I was copying files from the drive to my computer when my computer went to sleep (didn't run out of power, just went to standby mode). Turned computer back on and now it won't recognize the drive.
It is a USB 3.0 cord (computer is only USB 2.0 and the cord works with other drives) and when plugged in, the light turns on and the disk spins but isn't recognized my this or other computers (also not in Disk Utility).
Tried a handful of disk recovery programs but nothing wants to 'see' the disk plugged in.
Thanks for any and all suggestions.

yes yes yes, I warn people about WD drives on this link:
Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD
theReKleiner wrote:
What now?
Only option is to buy the SAME exact HD and swap controller boards, or pay someone a LOT more $$$ to do the same thing.
its not soldered there, its just a controller/ SATA "one piece"
They do that to save 50 cents in mfg. costs.
I mention your "issue" in that link. Which is why you do NOT buy WD ext. HD.
they make the controller board and SATA card one piece.
CURRENT MFG. THAT HAVE controller board and SATA cards as one piece are : WD USB drives, and Toshiba USB Canvio
However Toshiba didnt USED to do that, but they started doing it at the end of 2013.
avoid those 2.
To avoid that nonsense, buy Hitachi drives in USB.
Or, the best option:
Save money and invest in a bare hard drive backup and redundancy plan
Its cheaper
less fuss
more reiable, removes the nasty failure point of SATA card interfaces.
takes up lot less space.
Bare hard drives and docks. The most reliable and cheapest method of hard drive data storage, archives, and redundancies
The best method for your data archives and redundancies, which is also the least expensive, the most reliable, and the most compact option is the purchase of naked hard drives and at least one USB 3.0 HD dock ($40 roughly).
While regarding Time Machine and your Macbook or desktop, your primary backup is best saved to a conventional USB (or Firewire / thunderbolt) hard drive inside an enclosure, the most important part of your data protection begins after your 1st / primary Time Machine / backup; and these are your secondary (most important) data storage devices, archives and their redundancies.
However bare hard drives and docks (below) also work perfectly as a Time Machine backup, this is for home use, since the docking station is certainly not very portable as a notebook Time Machine backup device should be; nor should bare HD be packed around with a notebook, rather remain at home or office.
Six terabytes of 2.5" HD pictured below in a very compact space.
Bare hard drives and docks have the lowest cost, the highest reliability, and take up the smallest storage space
Drawbacks:
1. Care and knowledge in general handling of naked hard drives (how not to shock a bare HD, and how to hold them properly). Not a genuine drawback.
Advantages:
1. By far the least expensive method of mass HD storage on a personal basis. Highest quality naked HD can be purchased in bulk very cheap.
2. Eliminates the horrible failure point of SATA bridges and interfaces between external drives and the computer.
3. Per square foot you can store more terabytes of data this way than any other.
4. Fast, easy, no fuss and most simplex method of data storage on hard drives.

Dead External HD

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