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Hi. I’m using OS-X Yosemite (10.10.3) on a 15" MacBook Pro Retina I’ve been using my 2TB WD My Passport Ultra hard drive since around February of this year. Earlier today when I plugged it in, the Hard Drive didn’t show up in my devices in finder. So, I unplugged and tried again. Still nothing. Then, I went to Disk Utility and found that the drive was there, but the partition wasn’t mounted and is greyed out. So i tried to verify / repair the disk but have gotten a couple different messages. One being: The partition map needs to be repaired because there’s a problem with the EFI system partition’s file system The other being Some information was unavailable during an internal lookup This message has shown up more than any other. I’ve been able to get in and look at my files once to try to copy the files from the drive after a message popped up and said: Couldn’t repair the disk, but I could still open or copy files on the disk but can’t save changes to files on the disk But, I encountered an error that was something along the lines of Operation couldn’t be completed because the item “…” is in use. But the file I was trying to copy wasn’t open or in use by any program. SO, I’m in pretty desperate need of some help with this. I have some very important files on this drive that I can’t afford to lose. A lot of it irreplaceable. Any help at all would be very much appreciated! Thanks a lot!
Did you bang your disk or did you pull the cable in the middle of a read/write operation? When a drive gets this way it is fragile! What you do next could make recovery harder. So you don’t want to alter it too much until you have copied off as much as you can (just in case). If you banged the drive while it was running you most likely crashed the heads and a part of the disk platters are damaged. Now you’re between a rock and a hard place: The best answer here is to send your drive out to a data recovery service. Even then they can only go so far and it will be expensive!If you can copy off the important files you need then you could take the chance in repairing the drive via software but that will only work if the drive media and heads are in good shape.Lastly, you could try to get it replaced directly from Western Digital. But they won’t recover the data under warranty.
How do you copy the important files if they aren’t showing up on the hard drive? I can see the drive in disk utility, but it is greyed out and does not appear in finder… Help please!
You say it shows up in Disk Utility, but doesn’t mount? What does Terminal say is the Device Identifier in Terminal? The command to check is “diskutil list” (without the quotes). It’ll then list all drives connected to the computer and their partitions. It’ll have your primary drive as well, so keep an eye on the drive’s name. It should be something like /dev/disk0 and the partitions will be sequencially identified as disk0s1, disks2, etc. You’re wanting the /dev/disk# info for the Passport Ultra. Once you get that info I can tell you how to copy a drive/volume/partition without it being mounted by the system. But it’ll take some Terminal work if you’re comfortable with it
