Mac hard drive recovery

[mollipen]

Anybody have experience with hard drive recovery on Mac OS X? Basically, I've got an external drive that is suddenly refusing to mount: when I try, it says it is unreadable, and that I can either initialize, ignore, or eject. Going into Disk Utility, the drive shows up, but if I try to verify or repair it quickly stops at a B-tree error.

The drive doesn't seem completely screwed: I'm trying a few demos of recovery apps, and they seem to be accessing the drive and finding stuff. Thing is, I kind of refuse to pay $50+ dollars for a random app that may or may not even work. I've heard the top two choices are Disk Warrior and Data Rescue II, but not sure which is better or if the few bad things I've heard about Disk Warrior are true.

Thankfully, I have some of the drive backed up, but not all of it due to planning on soon get a mirrored RAID set up... you know, just in case something like, I dunno, this, happened. I know how bad I am about not having the entire thing backed up, trust me, but at this point I really just want to do whatever I can because I'll end up losing some stuff important to me if those files are gone.

[bbobb]

Data Rescue 2 is a great program, but I'm not 100% certain it will work if the drive can't even mount.

[Mykozo]

Have you tried mounting the drive on any comps other than your own? Give that a shot and see what happens. Don't know anyone that has either of those apps to try it out on? I know that DiskWarrior is fairly common in the post production houses I've worked in, but I can't testify as to how good it is cause I haven't used it personally. If all else fails then a data-recovery tech will no doubt be able to restore your drive. This can be really, really expensive though, especially if there is a physical problem with the drive. You'd probably be better off just buying DW if you have no other recourse, cause sending it off to a tech is def gonna be more than that anyway.

[mollipen]

The drive won't mount through the Finder on either of the two machines I've tried it on. So far, though, like I said, it seems like apps that deal with drives directly are having no problem actually working with it, which I'm hoping is a good sign. (I've had drives I've tried to save before where even trying to scan the drives for files via recovery apps wouldn't get me anywhere.)

[Nomi]

Data Rescue 2 saved my butt when Boot Camp ate part of my HD, for what it's worth. Nothing else would even acknowledge that the space was missing,

[Mykozo]

A little more research on the subject yielded a consensus on DW being the best at directory repairs, which corresponds to your B-Tree errors. Do whatcha gotta.

[mollipen]

I'm thinking I may see what I can do about pulling shit off of it first, and then consider looking into DW to try fixing it. I just have this bad feeling about going straight to the repair step.

[Dyne]

Freeze it. Then try to recover the stuff you need.