Western Digital file won't mount in OS X

[csand]

I'm trying to access some files for a client on a Western Digital external firewire/USB drive on my MacBook Pro. The drive will not mount in Finder. The upper level drive shows up in Disk Utility, but the partition of the disk I would like to mount (the only partition on the drive) is greyed out. I know that it's formatted for a Mac and has been accessed recently.

In Disk Utility, when trying to mount or eject, the an error comes up saying to use first aid. Verify and Repair Disk don't change anything though.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

[dobrevjetser]

First try to clone this disk to another one before trying to modify anything.
You can use for example super duper for that.
After that, you could try some utilities so see whats wrong.

If the data is important, first clone the drive !

Best regards,

Dobre

[dick]

I wonder if the drive was accidently/purposely plugged into a Windows pc?
I have seen this problem before as a result of doing just that.
It seems a drive with a htfs partition dosn't like to be plugged in to a windows pc.

Files can be recovered using software tools but as has been pointed out you should really work with a cloned backup of the original drive.

[dobrevjetser]

I'm now thinking that super duper probably wont work since it expects a valid filesystem.
Better to clone it with for example winhex or rstudio (only works on a pc).

Dobre

[csand]

I'm pretty sure this drive was plugged in to a PC recently. It's really a shame that just that will hijack a drive like this.

How does one go about cloning a drive on a Mac? And once the data is recovered, is the idea to re-format the drive or can it be revived?