Rescue a corrupted or formatted time machine external drive?

Saturday, 24 August 2019 00:00 | Written by Bradley Taylor | E-mail

For Time Machine to back up our computer data in a timely manner, we need to keep the backup external drive connected to the computer continuously. But sometimes we accidentally disconnect a time machine external drive or shut down the computer when the drive is in use, the drive may be corrupted. Or the drive was mistakenly formatted for some reason, and the data that existed before formatting was lost. This article will provide some solutions to rescue a external hard drive device and the data lost from the hard drive.

Fix the corrupted time machine external drive

Connect the external drive to the mac computer by USB cable, then run Disk Utility to check if the drive can mount.

A). If the external drive can mount, but the drive is greyed out.

Step 1: Repair the external drive with Disk Utility. Select the disk or partition on the left, and click First Aid, click Run to start the repair process.

repair the corrupted drive

Step 2: If Disk Utility can’t repair your disk and partition, It may be physically damaged. It may need to format to another file system or it need to do a hardware repair by the factory.

Step 3: Before that, we rescue the data from the drive. Download and install Fireebok Data Recovery on your computer.

Step 4: Run Fireebok Data Recovery on your computer, select the disk or partition from the drive, then choose the Volume Recovery or Deep Recovery to rescue the data. The Volume Recovery results will contain the original entire folder directory structure, but Deep Recovery only contains the renamed file contents. And the partition can use the Volume Recovery or Deep Recovery, but the disk only can use the Deep Recovery.

resuce data from corrupted drive

Step 5: Save the recovery result to the another drive which ’s enough to store.

volume recover from the formatted external drive

B). If the external drive can’t mount.

1. If it’s interface card or a SATA bridge card is bad to cause the failed external hard drive, you can use a HD dock to rescue the hard drive. https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6121

2. If you don't understand the disk in depth, take the drive to the repair center .

Fix the formatted time machine external drive

A drive contains one or more partitions, and time Machine support the partition with the Mac OS extended (Journaled) format and Xsan formats. If the partition isn’t using the correct format, it will prompts you to erase and format it to the the Mac OS extended (Journaled) format.

format the external drive

A). If you remember the old file system before formatting?

Step 1). Format the drive back to old file system(may be FAT 32, NTFS, ExFAT or other)with Disk Utility

Step 2). Run Fireebok Data Recovery on your computer, and select the disk or partition from the drive, then choose the Volume Recovery