I have used the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 to reinstall OS X Mountain lion on my Imac and i have used an external hard drive, but while rebooting, i didn't click on the recovery HD and now the external hard drive isn't visible. Can anyone help?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5)
I don't understand.
You used the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant to create a bootable Recovery HD on an external drive (e.g. USB thumb drive). And you used this new external drive to boot from and then what happened?
I didnt used the external hard drive to reboot, i accidently clicked the Macintosh HD at start up instead of the recovery HD as per the instructions and now i can't see the external hard drive on any pc or mac. So i dont know how to gain access to my external hard drive. I have important files on the drive that i dont want to lose.
Uh oh...
When you ran the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant, did you read that it will format the entire partition you point to? Unless you created a separate 1GB or so partition on your external drive and pointed to THAT partition, the Recovery Disk Assistant used the WHOLE single partition on your drive to create the Recovery HD. Since it's Hidden, you won't see it in Disk Utility or Finder or anywhere. You should be able to see it when you restart and hold the Option key down until you see the drives you can boot into. You should see your Macintosh HD, its Recovery HD and another Recovery HD which would be your external drive.
Oh no, that was really silly of me, i didnt see that it would indeed erase everything on the external hard drive. 😟
It's easy to rush through the utility and not notice the warning.
I only use a 4GB USB thumb drive and split it into 2 partitions. One for 1GB and the other for the rest of the space. Then I run the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant and of the 2 partitions, I point to the 1GB partition.
I sure hope you have a back up of your important data that was on that drive.
You may be able to recover some of the data using a data recovery program.
Data Recovery – Disk Drill
Data Recovery – Data Rescue
Data Recovery – File Salvage
Data Recovery - Recovering Deleted Files
Data Recovery – Stellar Phoenix
I didnt have any backup of the material on the external hard drive. 😟 But luckily i have tried disk drill and it is running right now, hopefully i can recover all my files.
Thank you. I was only aware of disk drill. It is still running in the background right now, so hopefully i can recover all my files.
You are welcome. If you get all/some of your data back, I suggest you start backing up the external drive. If you can't do that using Time Machine, you can try one of the cloning programs below:
Clone - Carbon Copy Cloner
Clone – Data Backup
Clone – Deja Vu
Clone - SuperDuper
Clone Software – 6 Applications Tested
🙂 I have recovered all my files finally. I will make a back up of the external hard drive today to be safe not to encounter what happened a few days ago.
I'm glad you were successful.
OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 to reinstall OS X Mountain lion
