# SEAGATE/macOS SIERRA Crises!



## cprichardson (Nov 10, 2017)

Hi all, I hope you are all dandy and I thank you in advance for any light shed on this little predicament of mine.

I'm currently in Borneo shooting a short film for a conservation outfit. I'm using an older MacBook Pro (2012) with macOS Sierra. My external drive is a Seagate 1TB Slimline Media Drive.

So here's the deal. Everything worked fine yesterday, then today when I tried to connect the drive to the MacBook, nothing happened. After around 45 seconds I received the message 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer', along with three options (Initialise, Ignore & Eject). The drive shows up in Finder, but not under it's usual name (Carl1), instead it's displayed as 'Seagate BUP Slim Media'. Here's a few screenshots:

















I've tried other peoples drives on this laptop and they show no signs of issue. I've also tried my drive on other laptops, and I get the same response. I've tried using different usb cables too, also without any luck.

I'm currently running a trial version of 'EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard', so far to no avail.

I don't possess the technical swag to determine how/why partition mapping no longer seems to be supported, but I'm guessing this is contributing towards the problem. I've backed up a great deal of the footage on the drive (around 200GB), but there's still a bunch of stuff on there I'm not quite ready to lose!

Any advice on what could be done from a remote island with relatively intermittent internet connection to remedy this catastrophe would be overwhelmingly appreciated.

Thank you all again in advance and have a splendid day!


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## spunk.funk (May 13, 2010)

With the drive plugged in, put your ear next to it, does it sound like it is spinning up, or is it cold and silent? If the later, it has failed.
How long have you had the Seagate external drive? If you have had it less then one year, it is under warranty. 
If it is over 1 year, the _USB Controller_ inside the _Enclosure_ may have failed. Or the HDD inside the enclosure may have failed. 
The only way to know is to Disassemble the USB Enclosure and remove the HDD. There are Youtube videos showing you how. 
Then you can attach the drive via a USB Adapter, *Dock* or in an *Enclosure *with a power adapter. If the drive doesn't spin up, it has failed. If it gets recognized in Disk Utilities, you can Run *First Aid*, and Easeus on it to recover the data.


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## VividProfessional (Apr 29, 2009)

any thumps or clicks from it are also signed of failure


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## cprichardson (Nov 10, 2017)

Hey guys, thanks for the replies. 

When I plug the drive in and put it to my ear I can hear it booting up, then for around a minute a combination of spinning and a clicking/tapping in a sort of heartbeat rhythm. After a minute or so all noise ceases, and the dreaded 'The disk you inserted....' notification appears. 

Also, I should note that when I run disk utility and attempt First Aid, I get a failure notification with the following message:

"Fixing damaged partition map.
The operation couldn’t be completed. (com.apple.DiskManagement error -69874.)
Operation failed…"

As far as disk utility is concerned, the 'partition' and 'mount' options are inaccessible. 

The drive is new, less than three months old. At this point I'm more concerned about accessing the footage than the drive itself, as I have a schedule I need to work with, and I'm sure sending it off to Seagate will not be a swift process. 

Given the above info, do you thing it's possible to salvage the data using something like Disk Warrior? 

Thanks again for the info guys!

Carl.


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## spunk.funk (May 13, 2010)

> clicking/tapping in a sort of heartbeat rhythm....Operation failed


The drive has failed. Taking it out of the enclosure is not going to help as the HDD inside has a hardware fault. If the data is critical, you can send it off to a Very, Very, expensive Data Recovery specialist. But most people can't afford this option.


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