I have a 2 Tb WD MyPassport Ultra external hard drive containing lots of important data, and a Macbook Pro running OS X 10.9.5. The harddrive fell while pulling down lots of data via wget, and now seems to be corrupted. I tried ejecting the drive (had to Force Eject because it thinks it's in use elsewhere) and rebooting my computer, but that didn't solve the problem. Here's the Disk Utility log:
2016-05-08 21:51:00 -0400: Verify and Repair volume “disk1s3” 2016
2016-05-08 21:51:00 -0400: Starting repair tool: 2016
2016-05-08 21:51:00 -0400: Checking file system 2016
2016-05-08 21:51:39 -0400: Volume repair complete. 2016
2016-05-08 21:51:39 -0400: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required. 2016
2016-05-08 21:51:52 -0400: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files. 2016-05-08 21:51:52 -0400:
2016-05-08 21:51:52 -0400: Disk Utility stopped repairing “disk1s3”: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Fine, I need to backup my files. The problem is that I can't copy any of the files on the disk -- when I try with cp on the command line, or with copy/paste in Finder, I get
Input/output error
and it creates a 0byte file with the name of whatever I was trying to copy. How can I safely copy the hard drive data somewhere so that I can reformat the disk?? Please give options other than buying some expensive data recovery software if at all possible.