Data Rescue 3
This weekend we experience a serious hard drive crash with our 2T Buffalo DriveStation. Basically the drive stopped working in the middle of coping over large amount of data. As a result, when we re-mounted the drive the drive showed up empty in Mac OS Maverick and Windows 7. The drive is using NTFS format, which isn?t 100% supported by Apple, but should be fine for coping data.
When the drive would mount, I saw that at least 300 GB of data was being used, but I couldn?t see any files, in Finder, Terminal or in Windows 7 using Parallels 9.
I tried to run chkdsk on Windows 7 and it wouldn?t work in the Parallels environment. Under Parallels, Windows see's the connected external drive as a Network drive. Turns out that the chkdsk app doesn?t work with network drives. When we connected the drive to a laptop running Windows, it came back as not able to fix the disk.
I tried numerous times using the fsck tool on the Macintosh and it came back as saying that it couldn?t connect to the drive. I checked various options that Apple and other users suggested, but they didn?t help. First Aid wouldn't work since it's using the NTFS format.
We were able to fix the problem by downloading Data Rescue 3 by Prosoft Engineering. After running a Deep Scan for 12 hours, yes for 2TB it would take that long, we could identify some of the files on the disk. (Note: A lite version of Data Rescue is available in the Apple store but it doesn't work in Maverick.)
We are not finished yet. We need to buy another hard drive, as we no longer trust the integrity of the Buffalo DriveStation. Once we get another hard drive, we'll copy the recovered files to the new hard drive.