OK... I'm not 100% sure that this is the correct place to post this, but please tell if thats the case. as noted in the header, the problem child is a Fantom USB 2TB drive. Its maybe 2 years old? Works great but I screwed up.

A few days ago, I was formatting a USB stick for use with my AppleTV. I was using Terminal and somehow I transposed my selection in the drive list and inadvertently overwrote the first 330MB of the Fantom drive. So now although the drive powers up just fine, it shows up on my Mac's Disk Utility (and in terminal) as greyed out in the DU and can't be accessed. Reading through posts here and elsewhere I have used restraint LOL... and not messed with the drive until I get some good advice.

So I was wondering... do I need to get this drive to a person/company that can either fix the screwed up sector or extract my data, reformat the drive, and then put the data back. I'm a retired graphic designer so here's a ton of images on the drive that I can't replicate plus a load of personal family photos. Its just a data drive, not my root/boot drive... but I'd like to get it fixed. I'm open to suggestions and appreciate the expertise here. Thank you in advance!

Mike/Western Mass

You can use software to scan your drive and see what it finds(e.g. http://www.r-studio.com/data_recovery_macintosh/)

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Labtech ,
These Days i Am Also using Recovermyfiles .Its File Craving Aka RAW File Extraction is Very Good .Might Be If He Does Not Get The Structure He Can Try That .BTW You Can Try Trial Versions Of Both And Compare

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

I did own an older version of R-Studio, and was able to get the discounted upgrade. It see the files just fine, but my question now is whether I need to recover (transfer) all the files to another drive or is there a way to "fix" the screwed up part of the drive?

I was advised on another forum that if I "know what I'm doing" it's relatively simple to recover the partition layout (there is supposedly a backup at the end of the drive) and use recovery tools to scan for the missing filesystem and files *but* the first 330MB of data has been low-level overwritten with data from the USB (which looks like random data) and it will not be recoverable. So is it possible to recover the patron layout and filesystem, and how do I do this?

Mike

Debating which way to format the "New" drive when I start recovering using R-Studio. I will be doing the recovery on my PC/Windows bc thats where my original license was purchased for. But the recovered files are going to wind up mainly being used and accessed on my iMac. The PC is relegated to a backup in case I have issues with the mac.

ExFAT is supported in both Windows and Mac

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Yeah... My new drive arrived this morning so I went with exFAT, figured it'd be a good compromise. Files are slowly being copied, one folder at a time. Don't think there's any way to speed this up and create a que.

Hey there DrGrafix,

After you've made sure all your data is transferred and safe you can try filling up the drive with zeros and thus reset everything in it to its factory settings and thus attempt to fix the issue. I could suggest trying with WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool, but there are also other well-known tools to do that. Here's a link to the WD one: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=k7PvBC

Post back with some feedback and results

Captain_WD.

Hey Capt...

I think R-Studio has worked, but not being a real hddguru I'm not 100% sure... yet. Is there a way to view _ALL_ files on the old drive using R-Studio? I'm talking about viewing them in a list form so I can see the file name and extension, not actually open the file.

When I tried viewing files through R-Studio, double clicking photoshop psd files, some wouldn't open, pop up said they weren't valid photoshop files. However, when I ejected the new drive, connected it to my Mac, so far all the psd files open just fine. I do have Photoshop CS2 on the Shuttle PC, and CS4 on the iMac.

Mike