URGENT-external hard drive unreadable on MBP, photographer in need of HELP!

Try disk utility -applications/utilities/disk utility - and see if you can repair the drive.

Try it a few times. If near another mac, try it on that too.

If that doesn't work then your best bet is a disk repair program like Disk Warrior. You can download it and run it but you'd have to buy it. It is very good indeed though.

Hope that helps, best of luck. I feel your pain.

I hate to tell you this. But I had the same problem before with one of my hard drives. It didn't recognize it at all. Well, Actually, it did, but it only showed that the disk was not empty, but it didn't show the data files.
In my case, I didn't loose anything important, but I ended up formating my external hard drive.
Here is a hope:
Back in those days, I was a new Mac owner and gave up too fast.
I read yesterday that some hard drives problem can be solved by using a hard drive cloner. (clone the entire disk to another external hard drive) Using something like SuperDuper (I think it' free) . Here is what I read on that magazine:

"The sort of random errors that can crop up on any hard drive may slow down your computer. To check for such errors and repair them, start your Mac from your OS X Install disk. (To do so, hold down the C key while starting up with the disk installed). Then choose Utilities: Disk Utility, select the disk from the list on the left, and click on Repair Disk in the first Aid Tab."

Don't give up man! Get those pictures back! Good Luck!

Hi Mike,

If you get to the point when DiskWarrior can't recover a drive the next step (which will almost always get the stuff back unless serious hardware problems or extreme file (not just directory) corruption has occurred), is Data Rescue 2 from Prosoft - http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

It is not cheap, and recovery can take a bit of fiddling and a bit of time, but when your work depends on it it can be a life saver. Highly recommended. In a critical situation like yours it is the first thing I would be inclined to try.

Be aware, though, that it is intended for HFS /HFS+ formatted drives. It is NOT designed to deal with problems on Windows (Fat32 etc) formatted externals.

Cheers

Rod

Message was edited by: Rod Hagen

I just had a Western Digital drive die on me and Data Rescue II really did the trick. I couldn't get DiskWarrior to find the drive. DR2 took about 4 days non-stop to recover the data and some of the files were damaged, but I got about 80% back.

I checked with professional data recovery and they wanted about $2000 for a successful recover..ouch!

Also - it was a bit weird, but the damaged drive wouldn't mount on anything except early in the morning, where it would mount but only read very slowly. I ended up figuring out if I cooled it down on the windowsill until it was icy cold, it could get it mounted- then began with the data recovery. odd, but it worked to get me going on the path to recovery...

Message was edited by: MrBerlin

Hey Mike!
Lets just assume that the Gods from the Olympus Mount will bless you with getting your data restored.
I would strongly recommend to use "Time Machine" from Leopard to backup your data. It really saved my behind a few times.
Recent decrease on the prices for hard drives make this possible. I got an external 500G last year and use it only for Time Machine.
I have a lot of crap in my computer and yet, I still have 150G available since November 27 which is the earliest date I can go back in time in case I need something.
I wouldn't dare to recommend a good hard drive and prefer to leave that to the experts but 1TB is not a bad Idea. Specially if you shoot pictures in RAW format. You can then use the 250GB (after you've recover your data and formated the disk) for Time Machine.
As far as the "weird" behavior of the hard drives (which I think is all true... Things can get really crazy and funny without an explanation) I recall that every SD card and hard drive that presented that problem you are having; occurred after I plugged or inserted those devices from my Macbook Pro to my PC desktop a few times.
Even Windows Vista made me loose some great pictures of my baby daughter when It damaged my Flash Card. There is no "eject card" rule in windows but I remember that by mistake, I removed the flash card from the PC while it was "reading" the card. That was the end of my daughter's smiling faces...
It happened again with a different card on my Macbook pro. Sometimes I shake in fear when by accident I remove a drive or card without ejecting it properly. I guess you know the feeling. But yet, I'm sure you can still recover the data since it couldn't possibly be erased in a fraction of a second while it disconnected.
Again. Good Luck!