In some cases, these bugs may be limited to a few corrupted files. ⭕ Software Failure – A healthy, well-functioning hard drive can become corrupted due to software bugs.Thus, you must identify the common reasons for hard drive failure to determine the best approach to recover a corrupted external hard drive. While these reasons may be different, they can cause permanent data loss. You can experience hard drive failure at any given moment. Causes of Corrupted External Hard Driveīefore you repair an external hard drive or recover files from it, you must understand what causes a hard drive to become corrupted. If you continue to run the external HDD, it may cause new data to overwrite your lost files and significantly reduce your chances of retrieval. The hard drive doesn't show up in finder.⏹️ Insight – Always remember that if you’re in a data loss situation and your hard drive has become corrupted, you should stop using the drive immediately. I ran the first aid from the disk utility app and the operation was successful but it still show the disk as uninitialized.ĭiskutil list: /dev/disk4 (external, physical):Ģ: Microsoft Basic Data SEA_EXFAT 3.0 TB disk4s2 It takes about 5 mins for computer to recognize the hard drive.

Update: I had to unplug and plug the external hard drive back in.

Is it possible to recover the hard drive? It got unplugged from the computer and now the computer is unable to read it. This is a 3 TB external Seagate hard drive formatted in Mac's Disk Utility as a single non bootable exFAT partition.

How to fix a corrupted hard drive mac