24" iMac with WD external hard drive.

[badbradderz]

I'm praying someone can give me a miracle cure here but im pretty sure its a terminal case.

i have a 24inch iMac 2.66ghz core 2 duo and a western digital 1tb external usb hard drive....this hard drive was bought a month or so ago with the sole purpose of store years and years of media to free up valuable space on my iMac hard drive....tonight without any warning at all the drive icon disappears from my desktop with an error message and now refuses to load, when i click initialise on the error dialogue box it takes me to disk utility.

in disk utility i have tried repairing disk and i get the message "invalid node structure". it then tells me it cannot be repaired and i need to re-format my hard drive.

as i said there is literally YEARS of info on this drive that i really really dont want to lose, is there anything i can do, or anything worth trying.

as a side note on the front of the drive it has a capacity gauge and has gone from 3/4's full to not showing anything.

PLEASE HELP!!!

 

[Rodus]

Give Disk Warrior a go. It really is a great bit of software.
You could also try downloading a Linux live CD and boot from that, see if it'll read the drive and then you can back up your data.

 

[Mrccartel]

Yea, its not looking good. mine did the same thing, and i just ended up reformatting it. but as i tell all, Redundancy!!!, you always need more than one backup drive. especially if you have vital information.

 

[badbradderz]

Give Disk Warrior a go. It really is a great bit of software.
You could also try downloading a Linux live CD and boot from that, see if it'll read the drive and then you can back up your data.

i see disk warriors name popping up a lot in my attempts to find a solution, is there no freeware worth trying as i dont wanna spend that much money ($99) when it might not work.

 

[Rodus]

I haven't personally come across any freebies that actually work, this kind of thing is usually pricey and professional recovery can cost thousands. ry the Live CD route first as it's free.

 

[ayzee]

Your best bet is to pay fir dome recovery software and get the data off there ASAP. When my flash memory went I used testdisk, which is free to use and works great

you can also use disk doctor at a fee but seems pretty decent