Have Multiple Backups....

Who you calling fat? J/k Thanks.

The they formatted it Fat32 or EXTFAT as they work with windows and UNIX like OS.

The Fish

Tried other cords today, it did not work.

It works on both Mac and PC as we never formatted it (not sure if it works that way, but it seems to work. Save both Mac and PC stuff on the same drive). Thank you for the advice.

We've actually done both OnTrack Easy and a couple others. They all requite money though to actually get the data, but you can preview it. But no worries, we got our data back! Saving it to many places now. Also, oh my gosh, $2k is a lot of money. I am sorry you had to do that. :(

Try PhotoRec or disk drill. They are both free. Photorec is also open source.

The Fish

Is the HDD formatted Mac file system?

The Fish

Hmmm can't even find one with a 30 day trial? Back in the day I was able to obtain mine by "alternative means," which was the usual way at the time. &gt;_&lt; Ahhh here's the one I used. Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro. <a href="https://www.ontrack.com/en-hk/products/data-recovery-software/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.ontrack.com/en-hk/products/data-recovery-software/</a> I do see a free trial, but it may or may not be restricted in functionality. The free one there lets you get up to 1 GB, but probably not enough. I think the trial might be worth a shot though. I used that to recover a lot of data, but one of my HDs was so gone I ended up paying maybe $2000+ to get all my stuff back (it had my accumulated stuff going back to middle school).

kallenin

I've tried several "free" ones so far, but to actually get my stuff, or so they claim, they want me to hand them money. So I might have too. But before we do that, we want to really make sure we can't access the drive still before we fork over cash.

Aha there are a number of software programs that will let you get your stuff. If the computer still sees it it looks like there might be something wrong with the partition information on the drive. You can get software tools that will let you grab files off of drives that have corrupted indices and so forth. it's been a long time since i've done this, but one of my favs from back that is Disk Recovery Pro or something...not sure if that's right or if its even still around. Anyway, a good place to look for some software like this is CNET.COM . yeah its an old site, but hey it works :)

kallenin

That is what we are currently doing. We've read through all those help things as well. We might wait until the morning to go that route. We are just trying to recover files just in case. A lot of those recovery programs charge like $80 bucks and I don't know if they will even work. So we're seeing what we can do.

Thank you. We purchased this drive hoping it would be new and last! We were worried the old 10 plus year old Apple computer wouldn't last. Well it the old Apple it still running and the new external drive isn't. :( We will work on it as long as we can.

Ouch. Next thing I'd try is to pop open the plastic casing of the external drive, unplug the SATA to USB adapter board, and plug it into a desktop computer with a SATA cable like it's an internal hard drive.

subaruanon

Im so sorry all this happened. I wish i was more tech savy to try and give some ideas, i really do hope yall can figure something out. :c

Sadly it still does not work. We have tested it on multiple computers from Apple's and PC's. The Apple's can read there is a external hard drive, but can't access it. The PC's can't even tell anything's connected. A MacBook laptop surprisingly allowed us to try and repair the external hard drive, but it eventually gave up and said to backup the external hard drive if we can, which we are attempted to do at 10pm at night on a Friday...

Uh.... No. We will give that a try.

Have you tried another cable to plug it into the computer with?

subaruanon