How to retrieve info from portable harddrive?

Hi Lindy, there is quite good freeware from www.pcinspector.de , called FileRecovery (for all manner of files, somewhat better at harddrives) or SmartRecovery (just for photos even RAW). Unfortunately, both of them are Windows only, and work only on FAT or NTFS filesystems, not HPFS (Mac) filesystem. I am not aware of such freeware for Mac. Frantisek

I have occasionally had trouble actually transferring picture files from my Hyperdrive when the internal batteries were down a bit from top charge. The photos would be read into the computer (visible in Windows Explorer, Bridge or Photo Mechanic), but they could not be moved into another file. To make it transfer the pics to a new file on the computer, I had to charge up the Hyperdrive batteries fully. Then it worked just fine.

Software won’t help if your computer can’t recognize it as a drive. It sounds like either the controller or the firewire adapter is bad. First I would try and see if it works on another computer, firewire/usb adapters can be finicky sometimes. If that doesn’t work, I would buy another enclosure for this type of drive (any 2.5” enclosure, they are cheap on newegg.com), open the firelite, take out the drive, and plug it into the enclosure. That will likely do it. If not, your controller (the circuit board that makes up the bottom of the drive) is bad. If you want to fix it, you will need to buy an identical drive and swap out the controllers. If that still doesn’t work, your head has probably crashed. You can take it to a data recovery center, expect to pay a few hundred to a few thousand.

Lindy, I am sending you a private message…

I agree with Tommy. I had some scary moments with a CompactDrive and was quoted 1000 + euros as the cost of recovering the data. The problem was solved by putting the drive into a different firewire casing. By the way, this was one time when I really regretted not having a PC – there seemed to be many more data recovery utilities available for PC than for Mac. Is this a bad time to remind you never to have all your data in one place? Probably. Sorry.

I have had the problem twice and easily rescued the data with file salvage, a mac program. its 90 dollars but its given me 100% recovery everytime.

here is the link

http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1