I have 3 Western Digital 6TB drives (WD6002FRYZ) and they all have an invalid node structure. I believe the cause is the very old external drive dock my friend was using to backup his files. I tried a quick Disk Warrior scan on one of the drives and it can find a ton of deleted files, but not partitions and no folder/directory information.

What would be the best way to recover the partition/directory structure, assuming it's possible? I'm not a data recovery expert, but can handle terminal commands. I've read a ton about the invalid node structure error, but there are so many different tools and suggestions, I'm hoping to find a little clearer path.

Thank you.

For a start clone one of the drives and put the 3 originals drives somewhere safe. It's very bad practice to work on live drives. Once cloned try something more data recovery orientated, ufs explorer, DMDE or r-Studio and see if they can make sense of the structure. Mac stuff tends to be more hassle than windows to deal with.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

DMDE Shows the entire drive partition with directories and files! Thank you!

What is the best way to rewrite the good partition info to the drive so it's recognized natively in MacOS? I'd prefer not spend the hours to "recover" all these files as these drives only have a few hours of use on them and I know they are still good.

This is what DMDE shows for partitions.

I did a test undelete of the partition containing all my files. DMDE did undelete it, but the directory structure and files were not undeleted with the partition. I can still see all the directories and files in DMDE preview / directory mode but not sure how to have DMDE write this information to the disk. Maybe it's not possible with DMDE and I have to recover all the files to another drive?

The problem is that you have swapped external enclosures. The drive was originally formatted in an enclosure that had a sector size of 4KB. It is now in an enclosure that has a sector size of 512 bytes.

The easiest solution is to reinstall the drive in the original 4KB enclosure.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

@fzabkar thank you. Learned a new lesson and a valuable one!

I'm surprised this is possible but sure enough:
https://www.klennet.com/notes/2018-04-1 ... -size.aspx

For anyone following, both "enclosures" were Sabrent brand made to accept any sata drive. I'm not 100% if my friend tried to initialize these drives on his Macbook or not, but somewhere along the line they were put into an alternate drive dock and something was done as they are no longer readable in either of the two hdd docks used. He has a couple others which are still readable and they were only used in one hdd dock.

... and if you want to go a little further down the rabbit hole

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/i-have-several-hard-drives-that-work-in-one-pc-but-show-as-uninitialized-in-another-pc.3503743/

_________________
Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/