[hurricanekate]

Hi all,
I have a Seagate 200 GB external firewire HD that I need some help with. The drive was used with my Dell laptop running Windows XP (I know, I know, but Windows was required at my school). Recently I tried to access the drive using my brother's PB running 10.3.9. Twice, the drive and all the data were recognized and accessable. The second time I got a spinning beach ball for an extended period of time when opening a folder and did a forced relaunch of the finder, then a forced restart of the computer. Afterward, connecting the drive yielded a message that none of the volumes on the disk were readable by OS X. After some googling, I came across the Panther-external firewire HD data error (or whatever you want to call it.) I then decided to forget recovery on his computer and use my own PB, to be delivered the next day (today), running Tiger.
I got the same message on my machine and so I downloaded Data Rescue X (demo). The program recognized the drive and I did a complete scan. Afterward I got a message that it was able to recover nothing on the drive.

So my question...am I screwed (ie, is my data unrecoverable)? Is there anything else that I can possibly try?

Thank you for your time.

[Mac+]

I'm not sure as to what caused such inconsistency in being able to read/access the drive.

What is the data (and how much of it is there) on the drive? Can you still access it using the Dell? Would it be worth trying to grab some files on a USB stick and trying to transfer like that? I'm not suggesting you do all 200GB of it - that would be tedious, but at least you'll gain some peace of mind if you discover that you can still access and transfer your data in the short run.

Let us know how it goes.

[hurricanekate]

it's about 100 GB of media (MP3s and TV shows, mostly) and a backup of my schoolwork which is still on the Dell. I managed to recover about 80% of my music using iPodRip which isn't so bad--I have more music than will fit on my iPod so I did still lose some stuff.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) I don't have the Dell with me at the moment as I am at my summer vacation home (where there are now four Apple laptops). Hopefully it'll be able to read the drive and I can burn the stuff I still want onto CD-Rs and transfer the files that way. I'm not really sure what I did, but I think the forced restart of the finder after it became unresponsive while trying to open a folder on the disk had something to do with it, I don't really know.

(On a completely unrelated note, I am thrilled with my new purchase and even this minor issue with the HD can't detract from my joy at returning to Mac. After being a Mac user for my entire life--we've had, by my count, 16 Apple computers in my household over about as many years--I began using the dell for school two years ago...gosh, it is good to be back!)

[Mac+]

Glad to hear you managed to recover most of your music files and that your school stuff is backed up still on the Dell.

You are probably right about the forced restart whilst the finder was trying to open a folder on the external HD. Anyway, at least your data is not lost.

As for the Mac happiness ... always good to hear.
Enjoy. :smokey: