This is a bit of a familiar sad story - and one that dates back a couple of years. Basically my wife and I have our son's baby photos stored on an external hard disk formatted HFS+. We had a big iPhoto library on there. Something went wrong one evening when I was upgrading to the latest Mac OS and the external drive was no longer recognised by the Mac OS. I was NOT trying to install the OS to the external HDD even though it sounds like it.

A couple of years ago when this event was still fresh and we were quite panicked I did a lot of Googling and ran a file search on the disk when connected to a Windows machine and sure enough the pictures seem to still be present on the drive. But what I would really like to do is somehow repair the partition table(?) and restore access to the iPhoto library without the laborious process of sorting through 100,000 images and saying "that one's a thumbnail of that one" etc etc.

If anyone is willing to help me through this process I would be so grateful and I am willing to pay. We are not wealthy people but our memories are so important to us. I am re-awakening this problem to hopefully present the result to my wife as a birthday present.

If you think you can help - please - get in touch!

Hi,
i wouldn't try to repair the partition, instead i would try to recover data by restoring them on another drive with a good program as R-Studio.
If you try to fix your partition filesystem directly, you might loose all your data. R-Studio instead will load the filesystem virtually without modifing anything on your drive, giving much more chance of recovering data successfully.

P.S.
Is your drive encrypted with FileVault?
If so, then it will be more difficult to recover data.

_________________
My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

Hi there

Thankfully the drive is not encrypted. I will try R-Studio.

many thanks
Dan

You might also try Testdisk. It is a free tool that is good at finding lost partitions.

_________________
On-Line Data Recovery Consultant. RAID / NAS / Linux Specialist.
Serving clients worldwide since 2011
FreeDataRecovery.us

OK I've tried:-

TestDisk (hard disk doesn't show up)

and

Partition Find and Mount (hard disk shows up as a USB Device but PF&M doesn't seem to even attempt to do any finding and mounting as the scan finishes in less than a second)

and

R-Studio (scan fails after less than a second with status: device not ready)

in Windows Computer Management I can see the drive but Windows asks to initialise the drive before it can 'manage' it. I have refused its overtures because I don't want to do more harm than good.

Sounds very much like a drive failure, rather than just software.

If the data is important then I strongly recommend sending to a data recovery lab.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Thanks - I agree with you in large part...but it feels like Windows just isn't willing to deal with the drive at all until I let it "initialise" it. I think I'd be able to interact with it once I let Windows do that step.

I really don't get it
If you have your own opinion, why bother to sign up to a forum, and taking other ppl's time when you don't intend to listen

It is likely hardware/firmware related issue, because the computer/machine cannot communicate with it.

Also, HFS file system is not natively supported by Windows, hence seems "foreign" to Windows, therefore suggesting it to initialize it.

Initializing a drive is a write operation, which if carried out successfully will overwrite the current structure on your drive. You don't want to do that.

Taking it to a pro will likely be very affordable, safe and headache free.

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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

On the contrary, I do intend to not only listen, but take heed.

It seem to be physical failure to me, you shouldn't initialize your drive because it will be worse.
If you need data, then send your drive to a data recovery PRO. Sorry to say that, but this is the best advice.

_________________
My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

Then take heed and and get it to a lab.

I mean you're welcome to mess around with formatting and other software solutions, but be prepared to lose everything forever. Hmmpff

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.

You might, you might not. Have you considered what a format operation will do to the data and the structures? Do you know for certain?

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.