I have not heard good things about WD external enclosures. The drive are supposedly OK. Take drive out put in another enclosure.
Stop using the drive immediately.
Get an external drive. I like OWC.
I recommend you do a google search on any external harddrive you are looking at.
I bought a low cost external drive enclosure. When I started having trouble with it, I did a google search and found a lot of complaints about the drive enclosure. I ended up buying a new drive enclosure. On my second go around, I decided to buy a drive enclosure with a good history of working with Macs. The chip set seems to be the key ingredient. The Oxford line of chips seems to be good. I got the Oxford 911.
Has everything interface:
FireWire 800/400 + USB2, + eSATA 'Quad Interface'
&
save a little money interface:
FireWire 400 + USB 2.0
This web page lists both external harddrive types. You may need to scroll to the right to see both.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB
The latest the hard drive enclosures support the newer serial ata drives. The drive and closure that I list supports only older parallel ata.
Here is an external hd enclosure.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW91UAL1K/
Here is what one contributor recommended:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10452917#10452917
Folks in these Mac forums recommend LaCie, OWC or G-Tech.
Here is a list of recommended drives:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5564509#5564509
FireWire compared to USB. You will find that FireWire 400 is faster than USB 2.0 when used for a external harddrive connection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#USB_compared_to_FireWire
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storageexternal.html
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Here is my list. Your going to need another external drive to recover the data wit these utilities anyway.
Boot in safe mode. Hold down the shift key when powering on the machine. This will run a disk repair program. Boot up will take longer as the harddrive is scanned and repaired.
See this article:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393
Or from mrtotes article :
Boot from the OS X Install disk and from the Menu Bar choose Disk Utility. Then run "Repair Disk" and "Repair Disk Permissions" on your hard disk.
Here the apple article on booting single user mode and using fsck. See the section on Use fsck:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Perhaps Disk Warrior will be of some help:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
"Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks."
They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...
http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery.htm
"Data Rescue II is the best data recovery software on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive. Data Rescue II works when other tools fail. Data Rescue II is also completely safe to use since it does not attempt any risky repairs to the drive while its scanning."
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:
-- been accidentally deleted.
-- become unreadable due to media faults.
-- been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.
http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id= 1
"TestDisk is a free data recovery utility. It was primarily designed to help recover lost data storage partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally erasing a partition table)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk
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"*Hard drive data recovery and warranty implications*
Hard drives that have become non-functional through normal use, and have had data recovery performed on them by DriveSavers or Ontrack Data Recovery can be returned to Apple for warranty service. This includes products covered by the AppleCare Protection Plan. The cost of any data recovery attempts is not covered by the Apple Limited Warranty."
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3974?viewlocale=en_US
Entering:
mac data recovery
into Google will list some firms who specialize in recovering data. Data recovery isn't cheap.
Examples:
1) Ontrack Data Recovery is the world leader in data recovery services and data recovery software offering the fastest, most convenient and cost-effective solutions to clients who have experienced data loss.
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/
2) Enter the world of DriveSavers Data Recovery…
* Data Recovery Tools
* Data Recovery Process
* Data Recovery Cleanroom
http://www.drivesavers.com/
"Encryption: DriveSavers engineers have been trained and certified by leading encryption vendors, such as GuardianEdge, Utimaco Safeguard, PGP and PointSec, to safely recover file-level and disk-level encrypted data"
http://www.drivesavers.com/recovery-services/encryption/
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List of recovery software tried:
http://discussions.apple.com/post!reply.jspa?messageID=11100707
Robert