Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

OK... I'm not 100% sure that this is the correct place to post this, but please tell if thats the case. as noted in the header, the problem child is a Fantom USB 2TB drive. Its maybe 2 years old? Works great but I screwed up. Just to note that I'm using an iMac desktop here and the USB drive is an external one. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of empty space on that drive as well.

A few days ago, I was formatting a USB stick for use with my AppleTV. I was using OS X Terminal and somehow I transposed my selection in the drive list and inadvertently overwrote the first 330MB of the Fantom drive. So now although the drive powers up just fine, it shows up on my Mac's Disk Utility (and in terminal) as greyed out in the DU and can't be accessed. Reading through posts here and elsewhere I have used restraint LOL... and not messed with the drive until I get some good advice.

So I was wondering... do I need to get this drive to a person/company that can either fix the screwed up sector or extract my data using your software then reformat the drive, and then put the data back. I'm a retired graphic designer so here's a ton of images on the drive that I can't replicate plus a load of personal family photos. Its just a data drive, not my root/boot drive... but I'd like to get it fixed. I'm open to suggestions and appreciate the expertise here. Maybe there's a way I can scan the drive to learn more about the "damage"?

One last question. Since I'm a previous customer of R-Studio and my original license period has expired, how do I re-new it for the discounted price as offered in past emails to me?

Thank you in advance!

Mike/Western Mass

drgrafix wrote:So I was wondering... do I need to get this drive to a person/company that can either fix the screwed up sector or extract my data using your software then reformat the drive, and then put the data back.

I suggest you first try to get the files back by yourself. If you fail, the it's time to go to a pro. Using our R-Studio for Mac (I expect you'll use your iMac) shouldn't make more damage to your files. When you get your files, you can reformat the disk and write them back on it.

drgrafix wrote: One last question. Since I'm a previous customer of R-Studio and my original license period has expired, how do I re-new it for the discounted price as offered in past emails to me?

This is not a question to me, please, contact our sales department.

Back to your problem. The files stored on the overwritten 330 MB are gone for good. Most likely the rest can be retrieved. You need to scan the disk in R-Studio, then sort the found files by their extension and browse through found graphic files. See R-Studio for Mac Help: Find and Mark Multiple Files. The found files may have very strange names due to the way R-Studio may find them.