How to fix my Apple external hard drive

After a couple of hard restarts, my external USB hard drive finally showed up as “unprepared” on my Mac mini. That was when I started to sweat.

I knew the hard drive was old and certainly flaky. However, it was not making any strange sounds, so I assumed the problem was not hardware-related. It was more likely an issue with bad sectors being written. This meant several things:

• first, all the data was not lost yet
• second, a lot of it could be retrieved with the right tools
• third, I must not “prepare” the disk, as that would wipe all its contents.

I think the hardest part about losing data is not what you actually lose, especially because anything important should already be backed up. It is what you do not know you have lost: the infamous unknown unknown.

I started looking at some tools online, but, as expected, it was a jungle. Between fake software that looked like malware and paid software with limited time or storage, I figured there had to be a free tool. Parsing a partition bit by bit is not particularly difficult.

I tried some paid software (the trial period) just to see what was on the drive. It confirmed that the disk was not completely dead.

Then I finally found a piece of software, TestDisk, which solved my problem exactly.

In the end, there was not that much on the drive. But now I will make sure not to power it off abruptly too often.