Resolving “The Disk Is Unreadable” Error On External Mac OS X Hard Drive
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Resolving “The disk is unreadable” Error on External Mac OS X Hard Drive

HFS (Hierarchical File System) is an advanced file system developed by the Apple Inc. It is the predecessor of HFS Plus file system. Along with the hard drives, it is also used on removable storage media. It is considered as a reliable and stable file system for Macintosh systems. However, some situations like accidental power failure, hardware failure, virus infection, and improper system shutdown, may cause damage to HFS file system and cause data loss. In such situations, Apple Recovery is required to extract lost data.

Resolving “The disk is unreadable” Error on External Mac OS X Hard Drive

An external or portable hard drive is a very useful storage media for modern computer users. It enables you to store or backup critical data separate from internal hard drive. External hard drive is also useful for moving data from one system to another. However, in some cases, you can not access stored data from an external hard drive in Mac OS X. This behavior may lead to critical data loss situations. At this point, Mac Data Recovery solutions are required to extract lost data from external Mac hard drive.

In a practical scenario, you may come across the below error message while trying to access data from an external Mac OS X hard drive:

“The disk is unreadable: Do you want to initialize it now?”

After the above error message, when you attempt to fix this problem with the help of Disk Utility program, you may encounter the underwritten error messages:

Verify and Repair volume “disk1s3”

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Invalid node structure

Invalid B-tree node size

Invalid node structure

Invalid B-tree node size

Volume check failed.

Error: File system verify or repair failed.

As stated in all the above error messages, some of the system data structures, user profiles, and library files on your Mac OS X hard drive. The problem may occur either due to node structure corruption or the file system corruption.

The hard drive is unusable, as given in the first error message and you need to initialize it. In Mac OS X operating system, the hard drive initialization is a simple three step procedure that removes all the data from hard drive. Three initialization steps are as follows:

Disk Formatting

Disk Verification

Disk Zeroing

The initialization makes your hard drive totally clean, without any files or directories on it. It is a very disastrous process, leaving you in a big trouble of data loss and require Data Recovery Mac to be handled.

Mac Recovery is best possible with the help of Mac Recovery Software. The applications use high-end scanning techniques to systematically scan the entire external hard drive and extract all lost data from it. These tools come equipped with simple and interactive graphical user interface to provide ease of use.

Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery is the most advanced and efficient application to quickly recover lost data from Mac OS X external hard drive. The software works well with Mac OS X 10.6, 10.5, 10.4, and 10.3.9. It recover mac data from HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper, and FAT file system volumes.

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