help with unreadable external hard drive

Hi ikce wicasa, and a warm welcome to the forums! 🙂

What Brand & Model drive is it?

Does it have it's own A/C power supply or is it Bus powered?

BTW, why is it still FAT format? Do you use it with a PC also?

With a Fat formatted drive you may need to repair it on a PC using Windows®. 😟

It is Mac compatible in that Macs can kind of use FAT formatted drives, and the drive can be reformatted to HFS for Mac use. FAT is not the best format to use with Macs since it is only partly supported. Macs come with disk Utility which can try to repair a drive, but not if it is FAT. For FAT repair you have to try a PC.

Unfortunately, unplugging the drive while it was still active probable corrupted the file directory since it was not shut down properly. This may be exacerbated by the unplugging also completely abruptly powering down the drive. In general it is best to use self-powered drive with Mac laptops since they are kind of marginal in being able to supply adequate power. Sight power fluctuations can also corrupt drives.

Limnos adds some great info, thanks! 🙂

Does the drive contain info/data you have no other backup of?

that was my backup!

If you truly mean a backup then that means you still have the original files on your internal drive, or wherever. You just make another backup. If you mean it was an archive/overflow drive then that's not a backup (and you should start thinking about buying another HD to save both the files on your internal and external since either of those could fail without warning).

So are you suggesting I go to a place/individual that does PC data retrieval? And does this mean I buy another external HD?

I don't know much about file recovery on PCs. If this was a Mac drive then there would be a good chance you could either use Disk Utility on your Mac already to repair it, or perhaps a utility such as Diskwarrior ($100) to do the same. That repair could be done pretty much in-place. It's only when a drive is really seriously damaged, in particularly physically, that you need a second HD. Again, this is if you could do this on a Mac.

There are supposedly Mac based recovery tools that can also recover FAT, but those would likely need a second drive and the results might not be pretty (files, everywhere, maybe without original file names).

I'd find a buddy with a PC and see if they have something on there that can do it for a cup of coffee. 🙂

I'd just see if a PC can Repair the Drive since the Format/Structure is PC, if it can then likely you'd then be best using a Mac to recover the files.