Accidentally clicked Erase instead of Unmount (iMac)
July 25th, 2016
Since getting El Capitan, the Disk Utility has changed,
I use an external harddrive to store all my movies, photos, backups of certain programs, and footage from my Action Camera (instead of storing it all on the 1tb iMac)
I usually only mount the harddrive when I need to access anything on there as the fan in it is quite annoying,
i’ve always done the same thing, going into Disk Utility and mount it and unmount etc,
but since El Capitan, they’ve moved the option buttons to the top,
and Erase is next to Unmount!!!
I accidentally clicked Erase and a couple of seconds realised and didn’t see any button to stop so I pulled the USB out,
i’ve restarted the iMac with the USB in there (as then it restarts with the harddrive available straight away)
but it isn’t mounting, it doesnt show up in the Finder window.
In Disk Utilities, the make/model of the harddrive shows as the main thing,
and then it usually has the drop down bit which is the actual drive (which I named 4gb)
but that’s now showing as ‘Unnamed’, and I can’t mount it.
It’s also showing 4gb storage and 4gb available in yellow (other)
Also, when I now plus the USB in with the iMac already on…
a window comes up saying ‘The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer’
(initialize, ignore, and eject)
Can someone please help with this, I wouldn’t of thought 2gb+ worth of data would erase in those couple of seconds,
so should everything STILL be on the harddrive?
I just need a way to access it as for some reason the iMac isn’t reading it properly.
Please don’t tell me i’ve lost everything as this is photos from when I was a baby until now,
this is photos of myself, family, friends, family videos, backups for work, over 1000 movies, songs etc
(obviously the photos are the important thing and i’m getting a bit upset about this as they cant be replaced!)
Can someone help at all?
is there a way to fix this?
You have probably lost them.
http://www.cleverfiles.com/
http://www.easeus.com/mac-data-recovery-software/drw-mac-free.htm
http://www.macworld.com/article/1143139/recover_erased_hard_drive.html
Try searching on Google. It would be best if you open the terminal and do a low level backup of the drive with:
dd if=/dev/yourdisk of=/where/you/want/name.img
Sorry I don’t really have a clue about it all, not sure what a low level backup is etc
Would DataRescue3 work?
This is what shows on the Disk Utility, I would of thought a confirmation button would of come up if it was to erase anything,
obviously having buttong close together and Erase inbetween other buttons used…. if clicking Erase then i’d of thought a ‘are you sure’ type thing would show.
Data Rescue 3(or 4 or the all in one solution) are made for this kind of situations.
You could also check these:
http://superuser.com/questions/169096/recover-files-from-formatted-hfs-partition
http://www.easeus.com/mac/mac-data-recovery-resource/recover-hfs-partition.htm
I suggest you to do a low level backup: if the disk is disk1s1 you have to type: sudo dd if=/dev/disk1s1 of=wherever/you/want/name.img
I’m not sure about the /dev/disk1s1 but it should be called this way. The of= can be everywhere.
In this way you will have an image to work with. Everytime the disk get used, your chances of recovering something diminish greatly. You can try those programs and you can succeed but don’t be sure that you will recover everything.
What was the partition’s filesystem?
Paid £60 for iSkysoft Data Recovery, had to keep the iMac on all night, took ages to scan, got most of the files back but a lot of photos and videos were missing, also with everything renaming it took HOURS to sort out