all mechanical hard drive may fail one day or another. that’s why you make backups… do you ?
All men dies.
But some younger than others, some older…
These disks were young, not very used.
That was an archival HD (and 1TB of videos from TV).
All drives, mechanical or solid state (SSD) may fail one day or another.
The best course of action is to do regular back ups, or on Mac, to set the drive content to be saved automatically to iCloud.
While 31G does indeed sound like lots of room to those of use who are older, as a percentage of 3TB it is more like 99% full which is I think more of the problem, as opposed to the actual size.
And my first PC was maxed out at 640KB (“should be enough for anybody”) and TWO single sided 160k 5 1/4" diskettes. But seemed like a dream compared to the TRS-80’s that I worked with that used a cassette tape deck for storage.
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Wrong conclusion. It is the free room for partition macOS 1; I forgot macOS 2 free room, but I was able to delete for > 400 MB of partition macOS 3…
And this is not a boot disk, but an archive HDD.
My search for diskwarrior returned first entry was for Disk Drill.app.
Apparently:
It detect the HDD ejection
It search for “lost items” (not sure at 100%; only 99.99%)
Like too many applications, its help fire the default browser instead of checking if Internet is available leading people alone when no internet available.
I checked my search, found a free download link that is a crook: no free download at all…
Tested with a M1 MacBook Pro / last Monterey.
if the disk gets ejected, and the led gets off, then you have a power supply problem.
it may be located in the external powersupply, or in the disk drive itself.
anyway, any attempt to recover the disk with ANY software if the disk is badly powered will result in NOTHING BUT GARBAGE.
you must have a constantly powered hard drive to try any recovery method.
30+ years as mac technician, mainly in disk recovery as customers assume apple is a well known brand that never fails, so no apple drive can fail…
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I don’t want to be cruel but if you care about your data, the rule is simple, it is “3, 2, 1”: 3 copies on at least 2 media and 1 out of site.
I understand that not everyone can afford it but you should still be able to save your most valuable data somewhere in the cloud for free.
Way way back, I lost an entire chapter of a book I was writing on my Apple //c and did not have a backup.
I never forgot that painful lesson.
Now I save on a backup hard disk, as well as in the cloud.
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Hope this helps…we do lots of data recovery from failing disks. Mostly we use free live cds like the one at system-rescue.org to both check the disks and recover data. smartmontools.org aka smartctl is some software on this live cd which you can use to check the health of the disk. Then if it’s bad and needs to be replaced you can use ddrescue (also on the system-rescue disk) to image one disk to another. ddrescue allows you to control how many retries it performs when it runs into a bad part of the disk. It also has an option to output a “log” to a flash drive so that you can rerun a second, third… time to focus only on parts it had trouble reading the first pass and doesn’t bother with what it has already done. 90% of the time we are able to recover 99% of the disk and the unreadable parts are on in critical areas or even areas that have data. “Your mileage may vary”.
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Thank you for sharing this. Good piece of knowledge.