How To Restore A Mac From External Hard Drive

Oct 16, 2020 • Filed to: Solve Mac Problems • Proven solutions

1. How To Restore A Mac From External Hard Drive Windows 10
2. Find External Hard Drive Mac

How Do I Recover Files from an External Hard Drive on a Mac?

Disk Utility has always been able to create clones, although the app refers to the process as Restore, as in restoring data from a source drive to a target drive. The restore function isn't just for drives. It will work with just about any storage device that you can mount to your Mac, including disk images, hard drives, SSDs, and USB flash drives.

In today's world, external hard drives have been widely used as supplementary mass storage devices for Mac. It is always an excellent way to keep your valuable photos, videos, and other files in an external storage device so that you can bring them anywhere. Then the problem might come: What if you accidentally delete files in your external hard drive? What if files are lost from your formatted external hard drive? Or what if files become corrupted in your external hard drive?

External hard drives are portable storage devices that are connected to the computer to increase the storage limit. These external hard drives are capable of storing tons of files, photos, videos, and many more based on its storage capacity. For many users, an external hard drive is a means to backup or save important files due to its flexibility. Tutorial to recover files disappeared from external drives on Mac. Step 1: Download, install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on your Mac. Step 2: Check 'Deep scan' at the left bottom and select your external hard drive where your files disappeared. Recuva is popular because of its ability to restore files from hard drives, DVD or CDs, memory cards, and external drives. Recuva works by searching for unreferenced data, and it's known for restoring lost directory structure and renaming two files with the same name during data recovery. Recuva is free to download with no data limits. Remove the dead hard drive from your Mac using the official instructions. The manufacturer website will have steps on how you can remove a hard drive from your Mac. Once the dead hard drive has been removed from your Mac, put it into an external drive enclosure. Connect the external drive to a working Mac using a suitable cable.

When facing those annoying Mac external hard drive data loss issues, Mac users may ask: How do I recover files from a corrupted, broken or formatted external hard drive on Mac OS X? If you are lucky enough, you may have a backup copy of lost files, and you can quickly restore them from that copy. If not, you can still ask for help from a Mac external hard drive data recovery program.

Part 1. How to Recover Data from External Hard Drive on Mac OS X

To recover data from external hard drive on Mac OS X, you can take Recoverit Data Recovery for Mac as a try. This fascinating Mac external hard drive recovery software supports almost all brands of external hard drives, including Seagate, LaCie, Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, etc. It also supports recovering all types of files no matter whether they are deleted, formatted, or corrupted from an external drive. Does mac use word. Moreover, this Mac data rescue software allows you to retrieve files from external hard drives, even if they are corrupted, broken, formatted, dead, crushed, or damaged.

Video Guide to External Hard Drive Recovery

This video tutorial demonstrates to you how to recover data from external hard drive on Windows. The steps are true of Mac OS X file recovery from the outer disk. You can also turn to the below text-based macOS recovery guide.

How To Restore A Mac From External Hard Drive Windows 10

2. How to Retrieve Data from External Hard Drive on Mac

Download and install Recoverit data recovery on your Mac computer. Launch Recoverit Data Recovery for Mac and follow the next simple steps to perform external hard drive data recovery on Mac OS X.

1. Select external hard drive

In this step, you can choose a specific location where the files get deleted or lost. To recover data from Mac external hard drive, please select the drive letter for your external hard drive and click 'Start' to scan data.

1. Scan hard drive to search data

Recoverit will start an all-around scan. The 'All-Around Recovery' mode will deep dig into your Mac external hard drive and piece the bits of your files together on it. It might take a little long time.

1. Restore files from Mac external hard drive

Now you can preview and check the found contents in the window after the scan. Then select files you need and click 'Recover' to save them on your Mac.

Data Recovery Tips：

• To avoid recoverable files from being overwritten during the recovery, please do select a folder on your Mac rather than the external disk to save them.
• Scanned out of the photos, documents, video, audio, and other documents, display 'preview failed,' the material has been damaged, can not be restored.
• For the software does not support the preview of the file type, such as compressed files, installers, etc., only the final recovery, to know whether the file can be used frequently.
• Data recovery is not a panacea that can't guarantee 100% recovery successfully in any situation. Therefore, you should prevent data loss effectively with a good habit to backup your data timely.

Part 3: How to Repair External Hard Drive on Mac

To repair external hard drive on Mac, there are two options, Disk Utility and Terminal. Now, let's move on and take a look at how to fix external hard drive on Mac.

Repair External Hard Drive with Disk Utility

1. Go to Apple Menu > Restart. Restart Mac and hold 'Command + R' keys.
2. Click 'Disk Utility' > 'Continue' > 'View' > 'Show All Devices'.
3. Select the external hard drive you want to repair in the sidebar.
4. Click 'First Aid' > 'Run' if you get 'overlapped extent allocation.'
5. Disk Utility will repair your external hard drive on Mac usually.

Repair External Hard Drive with Terminal

1. Go to Applications > Utilities > Terminal
2. Type the command line: 'cd /Volumes' and 'ls.' Press 'Return' to get a list of hard drives.
3. Type 'diskutil verifyVolume xxx (external storage name)' and Return.
4. Type 'diskutil repairvolume /Volumes/xxx (external hard drive name)' and Return.

After repairing the external hard drive on Mac, turn to Part 1 to recover files from the external hard drive. With Mac hard drive data recovery software, at least 96% of your data stored on the external hard drive can be retrieved without any hassle and much effort. Also, it enables you to scan your external hard drive and preview files on your Mac before recovery.

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