WARNING: EJECT YOUR DRIVES AND DISKS PROPERLY!

[Parker]

For all mac users who think/though they could get away with just unplugging their drives or disks without having to eject them first...

THINK AGAIN!

Like many, i thought i could get away with just shutting off my computer to unplug a drive,
and now i'm running Data Recovery software on a partition of an external drive that happened to be in use when i decided to "force" shutdown my computer so i could unplug the disk and be on my way...

My shameful move of the day  
I'll update y'all on how the data recovery process goes...

and PS:
IF THE DRIVE HAS PICTURES AND MUSIC ON IT... THINK TWICE BEFORE DOING ANYTHING DUMB WITH IT AND TAKING ANY SHORTCUTS...
Or Mr. Murphy will most likely be knocking on your door

[kelly]

Good luck Parker.  

[gunug]

It's especially important on the flash/pen drives that have actual hard drives in them.  I've got one that is an 8 Gig drive that looks like an oversized old-style cigarette lighter (made by Cornice) and it has absolutely zero tolerance for not being ejected properly!

[Parker]

I VOTE DATA RESCUE II BEST DATA RECOVERING SOFTWARE IN THE WORLD!



It saved my information AGAIN!
When i first bought it, it was because the main boot drive of my PowerBook G4 was corrupted, and this happened THE DAY BEFORE A SHOW (School play), When i needed to show a movie before the show started. Ran Data Rescue II, recovered the file i needed, !
Then when i got home, i ran Data Rescue II to recover the entire drive, which had all of my music and pictures on it. My iDisk also saved me too, because i kept all of my school work and important documents on it, so i was able to access all of those instantly from another machine.

Second time:
A flash memory card on my camera decided to start causing trouble, and when i mounted it on the computer, some pictures showed up and were working files, while other pictures showed up and the files were bad. DATA RESCUE II 'TO THE RESCUE' AGAIN! Ran the program to recover everything on the memory card, and all of my pictures were saved! (Luckily, they weren't personal pictures where it'd be heartbreaking to lose all of the pictures, but they were pictures from our school's boys varsity soccer quarter-final's game, so they were kind of important...)

Third time:
this time!
Running Data Rescue II as we speak! Did a quick scan of the drive and all of my files showed up, thankfully!
They're all recovering right now (hopefully it'll be successful... *knock on wood*)

Lesson learned: Buy the newer version of Data Rescue II
Other lesson learned: EJECT DISKS BEFORE REMOVING THEM, and if you see that little window stating that the drive is still in use... be patient!!

[Parker]

GREAT SUCCESS!




DATA RESCUE II
 

[Parker]

and right after the data recovery,
i open disk utility,
click verify disk,
reports no problems,
and mounts!



Do you believe in magic...?
I DO NOW

[jwboyd]

I'm happy you had such a good outcome.

I do a SuperDuper backup every night, so I always have a bootable drive with all my system and data files on it. It has been several years since I had to do any data recovery for my own drives. Before I retired I used to do it a lot for other people when I was the school district's "go-to guy" for Macs.

[sandbox]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane Parker.

I have myself pulled the plug on a firewire. Or just shut it down without going through the ejection phase and found myself in a similar position. I can't remember how I recovered the data back in os 9 days, but I managed somehow.

I’ll look into Data rescue, I see a demo download and also a reduced price at Amazon for $83.00
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00...7878398-8768149

[MamaMoose]

One additional thought vis-a-vis disk ejection: dragging the disk to the Trash is different that using Command+E! If you drag the disk the trash and if its icon disappears when you select it, wait a few seconds before you physically dismount the disk. I kept using the disk-to-trash approach and found that sometimes when I immediately pulled the disk (especially flash drives), I would get the the warning "you removed the drive ans it may be corrupted" or words to that effect. Sometimes it takes a few seconds for the OS to "remove" the drive.

MamaMoose

[Jack W]

Another thing to try before others is to run Disk Utility and Repair the external volume.

That has been efective for me.