I need to repair a 3TB HDD in Afghanistan...

[alfa147x]

I have a friend deployed in Afghanistan who has a WD My Book 3TB External Hard Drive with USB 3.0. Well his drive no longer can be read by his computer. He is running either Snow Leopard or Lion and the drive does show up on Disk Utility but will not repair the drive successfully.

Since they can not download stuff from the internet I plan on sending him a flash drive with various software options and some instant mashed potatoes.

Any ideas what I should send?

Thanks,
Alfa

 

[dave_the_nerd]

One vote here for Data Rescue 3.

It's commercial, like $100, but it works very well. I mostly use it to recover deleted photos from clients' cameras. It's saved a lot of headaches. It would probably take a week to scan down a 3TB drive though.

The application is portable - if you include it an the serial number, he should be fine. He'll need a second drive to recover to though.

 

[alfa147x]

One vote here for Data Rescue 3.

It's commercial, like $100, but it works very well. I mostly use it to recover deleted photos from clients' cameras. It's saved a lot of headaches. It would probably take a week to scan down a 3TB drive though.

The application is portable - if you include it an the serial number, he should be fine. He'll need a second drive to recover to though.

Thanks. I'll place that in the "Last Resort" category.

I'm thinking it might be an issue with the partition map. Trying to find a free app that'll fix that.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

It might be easier for him to send you the drive and you work on it here and then send it back.

 

[Tyranicus]

DiskWarrior is not free, but it's a great app for fixing a disk's directory. I have used it in the past in exactly this situation.

 

[KeithP]

DiskWarrior is not free, but it's a great app for fixing a disk's directory. I have used it in the past in exactly this situation.

A second vote for DiskWarrior.

Another option would be SpinRite. However, it requires a Windows box to run and can take some time. Hours, days, heck I have even heard people talking about it running for more than a week. It works on all file systems so a Mac external is not a problem.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

-KeithP

 

[Atty]

I once had a similar issue with a My World Book NAS drive from WD. My fix was to dismantle the housing, take the drive out, mount it into a tower I had and run a repair utility.

I was accessing it with my MBP w/ Lion on it but fixed it in my Windows 7 tower. Don't know if that would help him or if he has that option but it worked for me.