Yes — you likely can recover your files without paying for Disk Drill, and based on what you described, the data is probably still there. The “can’t be unlocked” message strongly suggests the drive is encrypted (APFS or HFS+), and macOS is failing during the unlock/mount step rather than the data being gone.
So why this is happening? From your symptoms:
- “Can’t be unlocked”
- “Internal state error”
- Disk Drill sees files
- System Info shows wrong free space
This points to: Corrupted APFS encryption metadata, not dead storage. The drive is readable at the block level — that’s why recovery tools can see files.
Before doing anything else: do not erase, reformat, or run First Aid again on that drive. Those can make recovery harder.
Here are some steps to try to gain access to your data:
- Open Terminal and run: diskutil list. Confirm the identifier is really `disk2s2`, then try: diskutil mount disk2s2.
- If it’s encrypted, try unlocking it: diskutil apfs unlockVolume disk2s2
- If it asks for a password and accepts it but still won’t mount, that means the filesystem is readable but the mount metadata is damaged — perfect case for recovery tools.
There are some free recovery tools that can be used to copy files:
(NOTE: If this data is critical to you, I highly recommend using either a paid version of a recovery tool or using a dedicated recovery service.)
- PhotoRec (part of TestDisk) – ugly UI, but extremely powerful and 100% free
- DMDE Free – allows limited free file recovery per session
- R-Studio Demo – lets you verify recoverability before deciding
