External drive and MacBook Pro 2020

¿should I stash the files and try to re-use the drive?

years ago, when drives of tiny sizes cost Thousands of dollars, the prize after a failure was a working DRIVE.

Today we know the prize is your DATA, and drives are really cheap.

If you took this to a technician today, they would immediately replace it with a new drive. That is because the risk that the drive would not 'come clean' or would quickly fail again is too high for a technician to spend all afternoon fiddling with.

If your time is 'free' then go ahead and try to repurpose the drive, AFTER you have a good backup plan in place. You may discover the drive does not work, or it may work but not be reliable, or it may work perfectly well for many years. Drives have always carried a limited number of 'spare' blocks that the drive controller can substitute for blocks that go bad in the field. But these are only deployed when new data are provided for that Bad Block (typically when the drive is erased and re-imaged.)

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Researchers did a really huge study of consumer-calibre rotating magnetic drives used in google server farms.

They found that the most common failure mechanism was the drive accumulated errors, then more errors, then a huge number of errors, then was unserviceable.

A drive with multiple errors was unserviceable in an AVERAGE (over a very large sample with wide variation) in about six months of 24/7 operation.

step one: Buy more drives and get a backup plan in place.

step two: THEN you can fiddle with this drive all you want, and are never "working without a net"

eudesb42 wrote:

In your opinion:

1) is the problem serious?

2) do you think I should pay for the data recovery software, store my data somewhere and format my hard disk, or do you think the hard disk (and the data on it) can be recovered without formatting it?

Since you've already tried plugging the drive into another computer, without success, I have the feeling that there is a problem with the hard drive and that it is serious. A slightly loose cable (e.g., one pulled out by a cat exploring where she's not allowed) might cause I/O errors and disk corruption. If you have another cable, it might be worth substituting that for the one that came with the drive, to see if it improves things.

I suspect, though, that the hard drive itself is failing.

I'm not sure why you want to format the drive. If you're trying to recover data from a corrupted or damaged drive, the first thing to do is to stop writing to the drive, as much as possible. I'd only format it before the data recovery attempt if I thought there was no other alternative.

After you recover the data, you probably won't want to trust this drive again. Not if it's showing signs of extreme hardware failure.

<< I've also tried Disk Utility's FirstAid, but nothing either. >>

Disk Utility is usually the key to problems like this.

is the drive SEEN in disk Utility?

can you repair/FirstAid the Mac Volume in Disk Utility?

if you use the "View" menu to "show all devices" can you repair the top-level physical device, and all items under it, such as the container-disk (if so equipped).

Please post s screenshot of Disk Utility window.

please post any error messages you get.

be sure to completely ERASE the entire Physical drive by its immutable manufacturer-given-name, and do NOT install Seagate Utilities. you want this drive to be owned by Disk Utility.

The downside of using the manufacturer's software is that if the manufacturer's software is not loaded, the Macintosh Volume may not readable, or may not be writable. This means that in startup manager, Installer, and in Recovery such as after a data loss, the Macintosh Volume may not be visible.

What that manufacturer's software does is to "spare you the annoyance of having to re-initialize the drive" from its factory set Windows New Technology File System (NTFS) or similar unusual (on a Mac) format. Instead, the software they provided would simulate a MacOS drive inside an NTFS file.

<< I don't have other backup drive for the files it contains. >>

you appear to have made a Grave error in judgement. You always need a Primary copy of your files and a recent backup copy on a different physical drive. It is not a question of IF your drives will fail, only WHEN.

That drive appear to be damaged and can not be repaired by Disk Utility. if that is the only copy, those files are lost. You MAY be able to salvage a few with third-party Utilities, but that is often unpredictable.

you don't accidentally click on anything to erase a drive. It takes about six deliberate steps.

A drive that is damaged and can not be mounted properly causes that message, and that is exactly what you have on hand.

this is very characteristic of a drive that is failing.

do you have your new backup drive coming soon?

on my report above of a rotating magnetic drive with a MacOS extended partition only, and no container disks, the physical drive is WDC WD800HLFS..., and the MacOS Volume (mountable item you see in Finder) is X11-Drv80.

If your drive can not be fully repaired in Disk Utility, you can TRY using rescue software to salvage some files off it.

The "approved method" is restoring your files from your backup drive(s).

¿what is the date of your most recent backup and by what method?

If you do not have a recent local, disk-based backup, your computer is like a ticking Time bomb. You are only one disk failure, one crazy software, or one "oops" away from losing EVERYTHING! Drives do not last forever. It is not a question of IF it will fail, only WHEN it will fail. In addition, you never know when crazy software or Pilot Error throws away far more than you intended.

If you are using another direct-to-disk backup method that you prefer, and you currently have a recent disk-based backup, that is great. If not, you should consider using Built-in Time Machine. Take steps to acquire an external drive as soon as possible. If you buy one, a drive 2 to 3 times or larger than your boot drive is preferable for long term trouble-free operation. Do not pay extra for a drive that is fast.  (You can get by for a while with a "found" smaller drive if necessary, but it will eventually become annoying).

Attach your external drive and use

System preferences > Time machine ...

... to turn on Time Machine and specify what drive to store your Backups on.  It may ask to initialize the new drive, and that is as expected.

Time machine works quietly and automatically in the background, without interrupting your regular work, and only saves the incremental changes (after the first full backup). Time machine backs up every connected drive that is in a Mac compatible format. it can not back up Windows format drives.

Time Machine's "claim to fame" is that it is the backup that gets done, because it does not ruin performance of the rest of the computer while doing its backup operations. You do not have to set aside a "Special Time" when you only do backups. When you need it, your Time machine Backup is much more likely to be there.

How to use Time Machine to Backup or Restore your Mac:

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

Time Machine may spend all afternoon making your first full backup. You can continue to do your regular work while it does this. The first Full Backup is by far the biggest backup.

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if time machine will recognize that drive as a valid time machine backup disk, which would require it to be Mounted, you can use Time Machine.app (not to be confused with Time machine Control Panel) to restore your files as of any date saved.

Time machine app uses the "Star Wars" display, with the current condition of what you are examining (drive or folder) at the front, and older versions receding back, back, back in time behind it. It takes a few moments to assemble those older views from its database.

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Each Time Machine backup is like an incremental backup in What it stores, saving only changed files. A backup as of a particular date contains only those changed files, along with pointers to older files already stored in this backup set.

So the finder-recognizable files in a backup folder for a particular date contains only changes. The rest of the files are in the backup set somewhere, but only Time Machine is likely to be able to follow the pointers and find them.