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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”

2016-05-08 21:51:00 -0400: Starting repair tool:

2016-05-08 21:51:00 -0400: Checking file system

2016-05-08 21:51:39 -0400: Volume repair complete.

2016-05-08 21:51:39 -0400: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

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.

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  • Since I'm getting desperate... WILL something like DiskWarrior help with this?? The name pops up in a lot of forums.
    – S E Clark
    Commented May 9, 2016 at 4:39
  • You can never be 100% certain, but DW has been known to fix drives that nothing else seems to want to touch. It works differently to all the other recovery utils, because all it's trying to do is rebuild the directory structure.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented May 9, 2016 at 6:44
  • Possible duplicate of How do I recover lost/inacessible data from my storage device?
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Commented May 9, 2016 at 10:44

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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if it possible connect the HDD to windows machine and try using a free tool called Hiren CD http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

boot from this CD and u will find something Called Mini XP mode or something like this, it is a mini OS that boots Ur machine and read all HDDs external and eternal, if this didn't work u will find tons of free software u can try

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  • The drive is formatted for mac osx
    – S E Clark
    Commented May 9, 2016 at 4:48

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