I’m trying to fix an issue with a Seagate 6TB HDD (formatted as exFAT with 3.5TB of data) using testdisk
, but I think I made things worse:
- I left files to copy overnight and in the morning my Mac showed a notification the HDD wasn’t ejected properly, and since then, I haven't been able to mount it
Before I used testdisk
, I was able to see the HDD greyed out in Disk Utility, displaying errors when trying to mount it, but after the below, I no longer can:
- When running
testdisk
for the first time, it displayed the following
I choseNo partition from this disk must be mounted: Open the Disk Utility and press Unmount button for each volume from this disk
Continue
, with the partition table type automatically detected asEFT GPT
Deep Search
showed a number of errors with the EFI partition, statingsomething is != 1
, with it only completing 0.3% after leaving overnightQuick Search
showed two partitions,EFI
andMS Data
Analysis
>Quickly Search
showed the HDD hadP
in front of itP
conirmed all files were there >Write
>Y
went very quickly, but still unable to see the drive on my Mac
- I wondered if this was due to the message displayed in #1, so I reissued
sudo testdisk
after unmounting viasudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
Quick Search
>EFI
andMS Data
detected, butMS Data
showed asD(eleted)
P
conirmed all files were there >P
to replaceD(eleted)
>Write
(took ~10-15s)
The HDD no longer displays in Disk Utility and diskutil list
doesn't show the EFI partition:
testdisk
no longer automatically detects partition type- Depending on the partition type I chose, it shows either:
Intel
:Partition: Read error.
EFI GPT
:Trying alternate GPT
- Depending on the partition type I chose, it shows either:
Quick Search
takes ages to run, whereas before it took ~15-20min, it's now been >3hrs- Data on the HDD is no longer viewable via
testdisk
What is my best course of action in the situation?