Hi,

I have a fairly new 300Gb seagate external drive. I use it to backup a bunch of PC's at home (XP) via USB2.0 and Firewire. I also use it to shuttle data to my iMac. So it gets regularly connected via both protocols to both OS's. Filesystem is NTFS.

Out of the blue, niether XP nor OSX recognise a filesystem is present. It looks like a new disk.


I'm not sure how this happened. I was doing some disk management on another drive of the mac while it was connected BUT I'm pretty sure I didn't do something really stupid.

Anyhow, I have some tools (getback for NTFS) for datarecovery and will see what I can extract. It's running now and seems to be finding structures. It will take some time, mostly the disk contains Ghost images which I can recreate and dn't need to recover.

What I'd like to know is how do I check the physical disk ? Most hardware tools from the manufacturers are IDE or ATA. This is USB. Do I have to remove the physical disk from it's clamshell and make it internal. I'm kind of hoping either the Mac or I did something stupid and the segate is sound, but I'd like to confirm that with a surface scan or through S.M.A.R.T

SeaTools Online

A browser based application that will check ATA, SATA, USB (Generic Drive Tests only), and SCSI hard drives without having to turn off the system.

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

Thanks - I'll give it a try