Recovering files from external drive clobbered during 10.6.3 update

I have an external FW drive (500 GB WD MyBook) that was clobbered during the upgrade to 10.6.3 (The Mini this was attached to is part of the everything seemed to complete normally but the Mac wouldn't restart crew). The drive cannot be attached during boot-up, or the Mac will never get past the spinning pinwheel. If the drive is attached after boot-up, it mounts without any troubles, and DiskTools finds nothing wrong with the drive. If the drive is accessed, what ever process is using the drive will eventually "freeze". It's not a complete freeze, because the programs are still semi-functioning, it's just that what ever process is accessing the drive will not complete. For example:
1) The Finder starts copying files, but part way through, progress stops. The Finder is still semi-usable, and the animation in the copy progress box continues, but there is no actual progress in the amount of data copied.
2) Data Rescue 3 recovers 377.5 MBs quickly and then makes no further progress even though the "Elapsed Time" counter continually updates. I've let it run for four hours and there was no progress past 377.5 MBs.
3) Trying to shut-off Spotlight indexing on the drive via Terminal.app results in "mdutil -i off /Volumes/driveName" never completing, but I can open another Terminal window and navigate the directory structure, 'ls', delete small files, etc.
It seems that the problem is sustained reads; however, even if the drive is just connected, something problematic will be encountered. Usually when this happens, the only recourse is to shut down because Force Quitting the blocked app doesn't succeed. Sometimes, the shutdown works fine, other times the drive must be disconnected in order for the rest of the system to shut down correctly.
Can tar and/or cp in the Terminal be set to copy all of the Mac file data (I haven't Googled that yet)? Is there an "UnstopableCopier" equivalent for the Mac?
Any other ideas how to copy the files I need to recover off this drive? The plan is to salvage what I can and then reformat/replace the drive.
Ray

Update. It's most likely hardware trouble. I was able to get all the files off, but it took about a dozen tries. Each attempt would fail, sometimes after 1,000+ files, sometimes after less than a dozen. I could always go back and restart the copying where the previous attempt failed, so there were no corrupted files.
The problem seems like something's wrong with either the drive, the enclosure, or the firewire port/software. Now I just need to find out which. Any suggestions?
Ray

Similar Messages

It is very difficult to import audio files from extern drives (NAS) into the new garageband

it is very difficult to import audio files from extern drives (NAS) into the new garageband.

Are you trying to open an audio file in GarageBand or a GarageBand project?
To open an audio file drag it from your NAS to a real-instrument track in GarageBand.
If you are trying to open a GarageBand project - can you open the same project, if you copy it to your system drive?
Trying Google translate -
Bent u probeert om een audiobestand in GarageBand of een GarageBand-project te openen?
Om een audiobestand slepen uit uw NAS naar een real-instrument track in GarageBand openen.
Als u probeert een GarageBand-project te openen - kunt u hetzelfde project opent, als u het kopiëren naar uw systeem schijf?

Recovering files from external hard drive

My external hard drive stopped working. Everytime I tried to access it, I'd get one or more of the following messages: "Time Machine Error. The backup disc is not available. Time Machine couldn't complete the backup to "My Passport for Mac. The backup disc is not available. Your Time Machine backup disc can't be found."
That didn't cause me to worry, because my computer was in good working condition, so I just bought another external harddrive. However, I later discovered that I needed much of the information in the old external hard drive, because I had lost a great number of files from my computer. [I have to add that I partitioned my computer's harddrive about the same time under the step-by-step instructions of a second-level Apple technician.] Anyway, my problem now is to extract the files from my old external harddrive.
Data recovery is out. It's just too expensive. Ideally, I would just like to get my external hard drive working again. If that's not possible, I have to find another way, or just give up. Anyway, today I came to ask about Disc Warrior. I have read some reports that it can be used to do what I need done. Does anyone have any experience, successful experience, with it? Oh, I just discovered and downloaded StellarPhoenixMacData, but I haven't tried it yet.
Finally, judging by sound and vibration, my old external hard drive seems to be working. There is no clicking or other unusual sound, which I understand is a good sign.

Kappy wrote:
In any case if you connect the drive to your computer, then open Disk Utility, does the drive appear on your Desktop? If not, does it appear in DU's device list in the sidebar?
The new external hard drive appears in disc utility, but not the old external hard drive with which I'm having problems.
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads.
So, I guess you're saying that any of those you mention are better than Disc Warrior for my problem. Is that right?
The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Okay, I have now disconnected the external hard drive. I hadn't realized that there was the possibility of overwriting files on the EXTERNAL hard drive.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.
Okay, I'll do that, but what about just repairing the external hard drive? Isn't that possible? I mean, couldn't it be something like a loose connection? However, I have certainly noticed that hard drive repair is not mentioned nearly as much as data recovery. There must be a reason for that.

Undelete music files from external drive?

Quick version:
External drive got reformatted, but music files maybe still there. Know a good, and reasonably priced, software with best chance for recovery? Cannot affort to send drive to pros to recover. Thx!
Longer version:
I have an external/USB hard drive which had a lot of music for my iTunes library. Unfortunately a computer guru, working on my system, reformatted that drive. Using a free trial of some undelete software it appears the song files may still be there. But reviews of most software online are very mixed as to recovering music, versus other, files. Sounds like many of them cannot recover music files and may even corrupt them more in the process.
Does anyone know from experience a good and reasonably priced, or free wouldn't be bad, software I could use to recover these music files? I understand the files may be trashed, but I'm looking for my best shot at recovering them and cannot afford to buy several software apps trying to undelete these, or to send the drive off to a drive recovery service. Thanks in advance!!

thx for your speedy reply. Let me ask, was the recovery for general files or for music files? What I read was that many of the recovery programs do good jobs on basic files, like Word and Excel, but that music files are much harder to recover and software might be very poor at recovering them.

Need help recovering files form external drive!

Well, I made a stupid mistake this morning. I am used to the Windows style of copying where if you have folders with the same name and it asks if you want to overwrite the folder, it typically merges the contents.
Apparently in OSX, when you overwrite a folder, it removes the content from the previous folder and proceeds to copy the folder..
So I went to backup from my laptops drive to my external and I copied the folder and it asked about the overwrite and I said okay and instantly had the thought that it was a bad idea and stopped it after only two images and the drive works perfectly fine, just missing a lot of images.
So how can I recover these images? I haven't used the drive since to ensure that I didn't overwrite the files... What recover software do you recommend for OSX? Especially looking for a free solution.. I don't have $80 to plop down on a more conventional program. Also, are there programs that can place the images in the folders they came from? Would take a while to try and restore my folder structure as well...
I did try the program PhotoRec that is free and open-source but it searches the whole drive and can't focus only on deleted files with the HFS+ file structures, which means there will be TONS and TONS of images that it 'recovers' that are already just fine on the drive.
Any help is GREATLY appreciated! I 'lost' nearly the whole years pictures. But I know they are all still there.
Thank you, thank you, thank you...
- KS

There isn't a free solution for data recovery, and even the commercial solutions may not be able to recover all the files, since you had already started writing to the drive.
More importantly, you said you deleted files from your backup drive, right? So, if it's a backup, don't you still have copies of those files elsewhere? If you don't, you need to quit thinking of this drive as a backup, because it isn't a backup if it contains the only copies of the images on it.

Error -36 when trying to copy AVI files from External Drive to Mac

Hi
Hoping for some help with a problem I appreciate others have faced.
I bought a new video camera recently and have just tried to copy the AVI files from the first few videos to my mac but am getting the error code 36 that states the files cannot be read or written.
The format of the camera is MS-DOS (FAT 32) but when I tried changing it to MAC OS Extended it did something to the camera so the mac could then not recognise it when I tried to re-connect it via the USB port.
I've been able to copy the files onto my friends Windows laptop no problem so don't believe them to be corrupt.
Have also tried the dot_clean fix but this didn't work.
Could there be another reason for the error? Any help or advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks

BDAqua wrote:
I hear 3rd Party, or HW Raid 0/1/5/10 are OK, but 6 months is the absolute most I got out of my many screaming RAID setups before they completely lost it!
Bummer. I'm not really doing this for speed though, just for total storage volume and constant, worry-free, no-brainer back-up. I guess RIAD in general is something I need to study up on. Would a simple mirror of one 500GB drive to another (back-up) - and do that twice - be a better, more reliable way to go?
I've used Tri-Backup3/4 for years for Backups, it's fast, automatic, reliable, works in the background if you wish...
Back-up software always seemed to have some kind of a hiccup to it, but I'll certainly look into Tri-Backup3/4. I used to Retrospect years ago, a rather fussy thing if I recall.
Now, on the Safe Mode boot - not a success BUT a different result!
I got the -36 again, but this time it was the external drive FILE that errored, not the OS-resident drive.
In other words, pre-Safe Mode the error said "...because some data in "ZillaHAL" could not be read or written." (ZillaHAL is my OS-X drive).
In Safe, it read, "...because some data in "WinXP Pro.vmem" could not be read or written."
"WinXP Pro.vmem" is the virtual machine file - which basically is a simple Mac volume (folder) containing all of the files to run my XP virtual machine.
Also, this time, a file* did manage to remain on the external drive whereas before, after the error, no file at all remained.
* a generic icon appears, but it shows a size of 16+GBs. The actual file is 18.13GB - I did manage to shrink it down the other day (from it's previous 25GB).
Well, that's it for now. I'll be away for three days, so don't mind me if I cannot reply back for a spell.
Thanks BD,
mp

Restoring a selected file from external drive

I do a monthly backup, using Backup, to an external drive. Now I would like to restore a file that holds photos for my iPod. It is the file that my iPod syncs with/to when I connect it. I mistakenly deleted some subfiles from this iPod Photo file.
When I select the iPod Photo file, on the most recent backup, I see all the file and subfiles that I want to restore to my desktop, but when I select the file (or even one of the needed subfiles) Backup does not give me the option to restore the selection.
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks.

see the following link for instructions
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2007111404402514&query=time%2Bmachi ne%2Bfilevault

Help copying files from external drive to another external drive

I'm trying to backup the files I have on an external drive and this has turned into ****, I feel I'm a Windows user all over again.
First I tried to encrypt an external drive, just as I've encrypted several others. The solution was to pay for a new OS (10.8.2).
Now I'm trying to drag/drop the files from the old external drive to the new one (Seagate 3TB) and I get this message:
"The operation can’t be completed because the selection contains both backup items and non-backup items."
In a discussion somebody said "Use SuperDuper". I downloaded it but it's an app to make exact backups. I don't want this, I just want to copy files just as I've done in years.
If someone can help me, I'd like to know:
1. What does that message mean? The selection was the files in the old drive. Both backup items and non-backup items?????
2. How can I simply drag and drop the files as I've done all my life?
* I DON'T WANT A BACKUP APP, I DON'T WANT TO BUY APPS FOR SOMETHING SO SIMPLE AS COPYING FILES, SOMETHING THAT A MAC SHOULD DO.
Please advice.
Thank you.

Hi,
in PowerShell copy is an alias to the Cmdlet Copy-Item. A parameter "NewOrNewer" does not exit. You have to create your script that meets of your needs.
Have a look on the CmdLet Copy-Item
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh849793.aspx
I hope that helps you.

New To Mac, How to move/copy files from external drive

Just got my first Mac computer. My music files (about 140 gb) are on an external drive.
When setting up iTunes the process of transfering and organizing the files took over 24 hours--more than twice as long as on my old PC.
I would like to keep the files on the Mac itself. I have plenty of space now, and I think not using an external drive improves performance. Then I could use the hard drive as a back-up, as nature intended.
Problem is, due to my inexperience with Macs I'm stumped as to how to do this.
Any suggestions would be greatly aprecciated!

I believe you would simply copy your iTunes Music folder from your external drive into the main iTunes folder on your Mac, then open Preferences, and in the Advanced section use the 'Change' button next to eh 'iTunes music folder location' window to find your copy of the iTunes Music folder and let your Mac know that's where all your tunes are.
That's pretty much the exact reverse of what I had to do!
Hope that helps (and isn't wrong)!

Recovering files from a drive that is now dead

Ok, if I missed this somewhere, sorry. How in the heck do you restore a file using Time Machine from a drive that has gone belly up? I had an external FW drive die on me yesterday. I thought, Mmm, good test here for TM. Well, much to my dismay, when I open TM it does not show the drive that I need to restore from. In other words, the drive that is now dead, who's data I need to restore somewhere else, no longer shows up in the time machine restore area!
I tested this by disconnecting another external drive, and attempting a resotore. Nope, doesn't show up either. Plug it back in, it shows up. Am I missing something here, or is this just a REALLY stupid design?
In the end, I have managed to restore the files by finding them on the TM drive and copying them somewhere else, but this is ridiculous. Isn't the whole idea of a backup system to be able to actually use it to restore files in case of disaster? I mean, if having a HDD die is not a disaster, I'm not sure what is.

OK... if that's what you want, it's trivial.
You can do it via AppleScript and the Finder:
tell application "Finder"
set oldFiles to every file of entire contents of disk "Volume Name" whose creation date is less than ((current date) - 30 * days)
delete oldFiles
end tell
but the Finder is notoriously slow in dealing with large numbers of files and folders. If the disk is large (or, more correctly, if there is a large number of items on the disk) you may be better off with a shell command instead:
do shell script "find /Volumes/VolumeName -Btime +30 -delete"

MOVING mp3-files from external drive into iTunes automatically

Hi all,
for historical reasons (mainly because I was coming from Windows years ago) I have stored all my mp3-Files (audiobooks, songs, etc) on an external harddrive. My iTunes library is stored on the external drive, too and all media content in my iTunes library is manually linked to the external drive. Today the option iTunes >Setting >"Let iTunes manage your library" ias well as "Copy filed to iTunes Media folders" is UNchecked.
In my iTunes library there is only a subset of all mp3-files included.
Now, I would love to get my library moved to the mac as well as the audio and video-files, and let iTunes manage the storage of the library!
As far as I know once I move the library (manul or automatic) to the Mac and check the option to let iTunes manage the and copy content, then iTunes will COPY the medial files to the Mac.
Given that I have only included a subset of my entire repository in iTunes I will then end up with a mess of mediafiles on my external drive where some are doublicated while others aren't. I will be impossible to figure out afterwards what is included in iTunes and what isn't.
Hence the perfect process would be if iTunes could, while executing the import following the automation-Option (see above) and MOVE the files from the whereever and bring it to the place it want's it to be.
Is there any way to get this automated and get iTunes MOVE the files instad of copying?
That would be a tremendous help!
Many Thanks for your thoughts!
Mattthias

Hi mradvanyi,
For help with adding music files to iTunes I would suggest looking over the steps in this article -
iTunes: About the Add to Library, Import, and Convert functions
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1347
If this does not help, please respond and we will see what else can be done.
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Brett L

Moved files from external drive to internal, now can't delete duplicates

I had my music on an external drive, but then I got a new Mac with plenty of space and I copied the files onto the internal hard disk. Now two copies of every song show up, which is annoying. How do I remove all the old ones? There are thousands I cannot do it one at a time... I don't see any way to sort on the field that shows the exclamation point, so I could select them all together.

from the horse's mouth: _*How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library*_.
also, there are 3rd party apps that can help:
TuneRanger (commercial)
_*http://www.araxis.com/find-duplicate-files/*_ (free trial)
_*http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php*_ (commercial)
JGG

Merging Files From External Drive To Internal Drive

Here is the deal. I have a notebook (Windows) with two internal drivers (C&D) and two external drives (G&H). Currently the iTunes program is located on my C drive with the other iTunes folder under "My Music" on the C drive. I have all of my music on the G drive and all of my movies and TV shows on the H drive.
What I want to do is somehow get all of my music, movies & TV shows onto my D drive so that my content is with me when I am away from home. I am going to scrap the external drives.
I know I can just copy the files over from the external drives to the interal drive and re-add them to iTunes but I really don't want to lose my album/movie art.
I am not sure how the "consolidate library" option works. If you have any advice I would be appreciative.
Sorry if I am beating an old horse but I tried searching the forums and could find an answer for my circumstance.

from the horse's mouth: _*How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library*_.
also, there are 3rd party apps that can help:
TuneRanger (commercial)
_*http://www.araxis.com/find-duplicate-files/*_ (free trial)
_*http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php*_ (commercial)
JGG

Transfer iTunes files from external drive onto new iMac

I had all of my iTunes files on an external hard drive with an old eMac. I want to transfer the files to my brand-new iMac.
It's easy to copy the iTunes Library folder from the external drive onto the iMac hard drive, and change the preferences so that new songs are stored onto the iMac, but it doesn't change the settings for iTunes. Then, if I "Add to Library" I get two copies of everything: the file that's on the external drive PLUS the file that's on the new iMac. If I delete all of the "old" duplicates, it will mess up my playlists.
Isn't there an easy way to point iTunes to the new Library on the iMac and have it change the location setting for all of the songs?

okay, let me rephrase my question:
when you moved your files from the old Mac to the external, did you
(a) drag the entire iTunes folder from <MacintoshHD>/users/<yourname>/music to the external
or
(b) use the +consolidate files+ command to move the files to the external
if (a), connect the external to the new Mac and launch iTunes while pressing option on your keyboard. when prompted, click on +choose library+ and select the iTunes folder on the external.
if (b), copy the iTunes folder from <MacintoshHD>/users/<yourname>/music on the old Mac to <MacintoshHD>/users/<yourname>/music on the new one, overwriting the iTunes folder in place there. connect the external to your new Mac and fire up iTunes normally.
if you want to move the media files from the external to the internal disk of your new Mac, go iTunes > preferences > advanced and point +iTunes media folder location+ to the iTunes folder in <MacintoshHD>/users/<yourname>/music. also on the advanced tab, make sure there is a tick in the boxes next to +keep iTunes media folder organized+ and +copy files to ... when adding to library+.
then file > library > organize library > consolidate files. this will copy all your media files to the location you specified earlier in the advanced tab. when done, you can (if you want) erase the external and use it for other purposes. or keep the files there and use the external as your backup.
JGG

How do I move files from external drive to Itunes on computer?

I am doing a system recovery and have saved my Itunes folder on an external drive. How do I get the data back into Itunes?

Install iTunes, the same version you had when you saved your music folder.
When done, don't run iTunes.
Copy the content of your itunes folder (iTunes Media, iTunes library...) from your external HD to /user/music/itunes
Run iTunes. You should see your content and playlists.
Bye

Recovering files from external drive clobbered during 10.6.3 update

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for