External HD has died...

Go into Disk Utility, and see if it sees it there. If it does, I'd say your best bet's Data Rescue II. It's only $99, you can get it online. If it doesn't, you might be stuck. You're sure it's the drive, not the cable or the port?

No way to tell from just that.

How did it go bad? What have you done since?

Disk Warrior can repair some of the directory information that MIGHT get your mac to recognize it again.

Could just be your power supply... you could take the drive out and put it into another enclosure.

IF the drive was un-plugged while writing, you could have fried it good. In that case... ugh. Go with your backup drive and all the material you backed up to it. I'm sure you did, right?

Video files are the worst at trying to recover. Even a professional group like DiskSavers won't guarantee a video drive.


Good luck,

CaptM

Could mean anything, varies with the drive manufacturer.

If all the things the Capt and I suggested don't work, my first step would be to get (or borrow from someone) another external enclosure, and hook up the drive inside your dead enclosure to the new one. If it still doesn't work, then you know it's your drive, not your enclosure (thought it could be both). If you happen to have a spare drive lying around, you could try the reverse by putting the other drive into your dead enclosure.

Hi(Bonjour)!

Sometimes the drive is to hot and jam. I rescued the content of a 9 years old hard drive last week by putting the drive in a ziplock in the freezer for one hour. Afterwhat, I reconnected and backup all the content to another drive.

Search the web, the method is weel documented and tested.

Michel Boissonneault