Hi I have a My Passport For Mac external drive that won't mount in Disk Utility and First Aid process keeps failing ... just wondering if Disk Warrior is the best option for software to download to try to recover my data?? Thanks in advance!
MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11
If the drive has a hardware failure (or Disk Warrior thinks it does), then Disk Warrior will refuse to make any modifications to the drive.
If the drive is failing, then you need to be extremely careful anyway since the more you attempt to access it, the worse the failure will become where even a professional data recovery service will be unable to recover any data from it. macOS and most consumer apps (even data recovery apps) are not able to handle the I/O errors thrown up by a physically failing drive. Plus you usually only get one chance at recovering data, so choose wisely.
You can try checking the health of the drive by running DriveDx (free trial period) and posting the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. You will need to install a special USB driver as well to attempt access to the external drive's health information.
FYI, you should have had a backup of any important data on this external drive if it contained important data. Apple includes the Time Machine backup software for free with every copy of macOS.....all the user needs to do is supply an external drive for it & configure it. The more important the data, the more backup copies you should have. There are a lot more new ways to permanently lose access to data on the internal SSD of the recent Macs due to all the hardware, software, & security changes. It is also getting more difficult to recover data from external drives as well.
If the drive has a hardware failure (or Disk Warrior thinks it does), then Disk Warrior will refuse to make any modifications to the drive.
If the drive is failing, then you need to be extremely careful anyway since the more you attempt to access it, the worse the failure will become where even a professional data recovery service will be unable to recover any data from it. macOS and most consumer apps (even data recovery apps) are not able to handle the I/O errors thrown up by a physically failing drive. Plus you usually only get one chance at recovering data, so choose wisely.
You can try checking the health of the drive by running DriveDx (free trial period) and posting the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. You will need to install a special USB driver as well to attempt access to the external drive's health information.
FYI, you should have had a backup of any important data on this external drive if it contained important data. Apple includes the Time Machine backup software for free with every copy of macOS.....all the user needs to do is supply an external drive for it & configure it. The more important the data, the more backup copies you should have. There are a lot more new ways to permanently lose access to data on the internal SSD of the recent Macs due to all the hardware, software, & security changes. It is also getting more difficult to recover data from external drives as well.
DiscWarrior is a great choice, ay even repair it even if DU cannot.
Assuming the Drive is NOT APFS format, but is MacOS Extended.
Thanks, very much appreciated!
Thanks for all that info, really appreciate it!
Data recovery from My Passport For Mac external drive
