My external hard drive, which I use to store photos, is not mounting. Disk Utility can see it, showing the make and description of the drive, the outer envelope so to speak, and the actual named drive (cunningly called Photographs). It tells me too that the 2TB drive is now completely full, but it will not mount it. Being currently between back-ups, my reserve photos hard drive is missing some items that I added to Photographs this last week and I need to retrieve them. How do I go about it?
Things aren't quite as bad as I thought - I had, in fact, backed up the latest items, so all is not completely lost. Checking the back-up drive I have found, that of its' 250GB 65GB is still free. The back-up only has photo files. On the Photographs drive I also have a complete series of Expressions Media catalogue files but these are only of thumbnails which might well add as much as 50GB. But the Photographs drive is 2TB. So at most some 300GB wold be on there, hardly touching its' capacity. Something has made the drive appear full and it is this that requires correction. Would either Disk Warrior or TechTool Pro be the right programs to do this?
In the end I took the easy option. I checked that all the files I needed were on my out-of-house back-up, which lives at a neighbours' house for most of the month, and then deleted and re-formatted the delinquent drive. And aded the catalogue files onto my in-house backup so I now have three full sets. Thank goodness for back-ups!
Michael, you're right to reformat the drive: it's a lot more certain than trying to correct the corruption that you're seeing. If there is data on a drive that isn't elsewhere, by all means try to repair the drive in order to recover the files but the story needs to end with a reformat.
Personally, I would put your drive on notice: don't keep anything on it that isn't duplicated elsewhere and use it for a few months to see if it misbehaves again; if it does, bin it. And take a gold star for already having multiple back-ups!
I have just retired - with extreme prejudice - a back-up HD as it's thrown two wobblies in about 3 months though continues to work most of the time. It seems a waste but it's just not worth the risk and aggravation 😨
Michael Corgan 