subject: Data Loss From External Mac Hard Drive After Superblock Corruption [print this page] Mac OS X supports external USB and FireWire hard drives to store your data, create backup, or even install an operating system. You can access data from external hard drives by simply attaching them and mounting them. However, in some situations, an external hard drive is mysteriously un-mounted by Mac OS X computer, while storing data to or accessing data from the drive. This sudden behavior of Macintosh operating systems makes your hard drive inaccessible and cause critical data loss situations. In order to get your valuable data recovered in such cases, you need to go for Mac data recovery solutions, if there is no updated backup in place.
When a Mac OS X external hard drive is un-mounted automatically, you do not hear any sort of strange noises. It means the hard drive is physically intact and in working state. When you attach your external hard drive to Mac OS X computer, you come across either of the below error messages:
Mount: wrong FS type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
Missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog- try dmesg tail or so
Or
Unknown device
It provides you two choices, either to 'Initialize' your Mac OS X hard drive or to 'Cancel' the process. It renders all your data inaccessible. To retrieve data from the hard drive in such cases, you need to identify the cause of this behavior and fix it through data Mac Disk Recovery.
Grounds of the problem
As stated in the above error message, the problem is generally caused due to corruption to the file system, missing or damaged system files, or superblock corruption. Corruption can be caused by various reasons, such as virus infection, operating system malfunction, and improper system shutdown.
Solution
In order to sort out this behavior of Mac OS X operating system, you need to replace the damaged data structures. It is possible by formatting the hard drive and reinstalling operating system. However, it removes all the data from hard drive and create needs of Mac recovery.
Mac recovery software are powerful enough to methodically scan entire hard drive and extract all lost data from it. They offer easy and safe recovery in all data loss situations, with interactive graphical user interface and read-only conduct.
Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery is the most advanced and comprehensive utility to ensure absolute recovery of your valuable data. The software works well with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.5 Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, and 10.3.9 Panther. It supports recovery from HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper, and FAT file system volumes.
