Data Recovery from an Unreadable External Mac Hard Drive

Under certain situations, your Mac operating system can not read data from an external hard drive. The problem could be due to damaged or corrupted hard drive metadata structure and other similar issues. Such situations make all your critical and valuable data inaccessible and cause serious data loss. Mac Data Recovery is required in order to sort out such issues.

When you attempt to access data from an external Mac Hard drive, you might come across the below given error message:

"The disk is unreadable: Do you want to initialize it now?"

After this behavior of Mac operating system, when you use Disk Utility to resolve the problem, you may receive the following error message:

"Verify and Repair volume "disk1s3"

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Invalid node structure

Invalid B-tree node size

Invalid node structure

Invalid B-tree node size

Volume check failed.

Error: File system verifies or repair failed."

These errors make your hard drive inaccessible and cause serious data loss situations.

Grounds of the issue

As stated in the above error message, the problem gets encountered due to affected system metadata structures, hard drive profiles, system files and library files. Such issues may also occur due to inode structure corruption or file system damage.

Resolution

As mentioned in the first error message, the hard drive becomes unusable and you need to initialize the hard drive. In Mac, the hard drive initialization process includes three steps that erase all data from the Mac hard drive. These three steps are:

Disk Formatting

Disk Verification

Disk Zeroing

After Disk Initialization routine, your hard drive will have just unallocated space without having any data or file system. In other words, you will be able to get rid of the error messages on cost of data saved in the Mac volumes. Thus, you should never perform disk initialization without backing up all yor valuable data.

The problem occurs due to disk data structure corruption and thusMac Recovery is required to scan the drive and extract all data from it.

This is best possible with the help of powerful third party Mac Data Recovery software. These are highly automated tools that perform thorough scanning of the entire Mac hard drive and retrieve all data from it. These software are very user-friendly and simple to use. They enable you to achieve quick and easy Data Recovery Mac in almost all data loss situations.

Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery is the foremost Mac Recovery tool. The software comes with Stellar Boot DVD to recover data from unbootable Macs. It supports HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper and FAT file system volumes. The software is compatible with Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard, 10.4.x Tiger and 10.3.9 Panther.