HELP! All my files are GONE!

vaultingat

I had moved all my files to an 80gb external LaCie firewire hardrive a couple of months ago and it had been going very well. Last night I used Norton AntiVirus and scanned both the internal and the LaCie. This morning, before taking my computer with me, I "ejected" the external drive, waiting for it to disappear from the screen, and unplugged it normally. When i got back from class, i plugged it back in and got the "this disk has no volumes that mac os x can read. would you like to initialize..." message. I am devastated. That harddrive had all my data ever on it. All my design work which i was just starting to consolidate into a portfolio, EVERYTHING. I called a data recovery place and they said it would cost between $500-$2700 to recover the data. What should i do? Somebody please help me.



by the way, os9 wasn't able to read it either. i have a tibook 800 running 10.2.6.



Thank you for your help in advance.



Felipe

ghost_user_name

First step: get yourself a copy of DiskWarrior ASAP and have it check out the drive. I've seen DW save completely unreadable drives on several occasions. Do note, though, that for a large drive it could take a LONG time to complete (days perhaps) but if the data is really important, it's well worth the wait.



If you get it running, I think you might should learn to make backups. Keeping all of your data on a single drive -- a portable drive no less! -- is practically asking for disaster. CDs are dirt cheap and make for quick and easy backups.



Also, my 2¢, I wouldn't recommend running Norton Utilities on the drive unless as a last resort.

jbl

I keep almost all of my data on external drives also (I keep two so I can back them up). Occationally the same thing happens to me. In almost every case, if I boot into 9, the computer will recognize the disk. Then I can boot into X and things work fine. I don't know why this works but you could give it a shot, while you are waiting for your copy of DiskWarrior to arrive.