Restore partitioned drive to old data

I'm probably not asking the question properly, please forgive me.

Just bought a new MacBook Pro. Time Machine prompted me to set up backups. It's late, without reading properly I hit 'ok' and instead of it backing up to my Time Capsule, it started to partition an external hard drive full of family photos.

I yanked out the cable (yeah I know) to stop it. The drive is readable and formattable, but First Aid won't fix it and I can't mount it. It recommends I back up the data from the drive, but I'm struggling to see how I can access anything on it. I have the option to create a disk image still - might that help in some way? it wants to make a 2 TB image which means buying a new hard drive if I'm to move the contents anywhere, but if there's a way to go in, pull out what data I can, and format the rest, I'd be happy. Even if not by using anything built in, recommended software would be appreciated too.

Any help much appreciated.

Posted on Feb 10, 2020 3:43 PM

Top-ranking reply

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Posted on Feb 10, 2020 7:46 PM

The drive has been garbaged by what happened. You can try using recovery software to try restoring your files.

General File Recovery

If you stop using the disk it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as MAC Data Recovery, Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on a bootable CD to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the disk. Recovery software usually provides trial versions that enable you to determine if the software would help before actually paying for it. Beyond this or if the drive has completely failed, then you would need to send the drive to a recovery service like Drive Savers, which is very expensive.

The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten. Unfortunately, these programs do not work on SSDs.

Also, visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

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Restore partitioned drive to old data

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