Help Recover files from a corrupt drive...

[Access Denied]

I bought a docking station for my spare HDD. Took it all round a mates because he's got every episode of Mythbusters on his computer. Now he has a mac but since it was plugged in via USB that should make no difference. Put Mythbusters on my HDD and home I came. He still had the docking station for something so I plugged my HDD into my computer instead of the other one that's in there. "This drive will need formatting before it can be used" I'd already done that before I went to my mates so I said no. Tried accessing the drive. "The device or directory is corrupt and unreadable"

Now I'm guessing that happened because I took the HDD out of the dock without turning the dock off first? Anyway, does anyone know a way I can recover the drive without having to format and lose Mythbusters?

Ta muchly!

 

[soze]

I would ask your friend how/if he formatted the disk. Mac's don't format to a PC readable format by default from what i remember, and a disk in the wrong format will throw the same error. But it is possible so if your friend is switched on they may have done it.

I have used the following software for recovery and it works well. The free version only pulls 1GB off the disk but it should let you check to see if its recoverable. http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm

 

[SheepCow]

Assuming it was NTFS Windows can usually recover if you disconnect without dismounting first. Are you sure his Mac didn't badger it right up?

 

[WPKenny]

Mac's use their own file system so if it was a fresh drive it would have asked to initialise it before you could use it. Macs can only read NTFS and not write to it, so I imagine it's probably fine but formatted just for Macs.

You can format it as FAT32 so both can read and write to it but that will limit the size of individual files to around 4 gig. Alternatively he uses Mac's Bootcamp and loads up Windows so you read and write natively to the drive in a way your computer will understand.