Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Reasons for an unmountable drive in Mac and how to recover data?

We create different volume to save different file types like system files, user files. etc. So a separate volume is created for system related files, user files and software files. Saving files in different volume will allow Mac OS X to manage and operate on the files easily and quickly. To get information regarding a volume, its corresponding file systems needs to be mounted after booting Mac. It is the responsibility of OS X to mount drive first to gain access to the data in the volume.

But sometimes due to some error the drive fails to mount and the possible reason for a drive to get failed to mount are:
  • Problem in the file system. File systems might have got corrupted or some files are missing from the files system due to which it is unable to mount.
  • Sometimes improper shut-down is also responsible.
  • Failure of hardware can also be the reason for unmounting of hard drive.
  • Software corruption can also leads to the hard drive failing to unmount.
  • Bad sectors in hard drive sometimes makes it unable to mount.
  • Physical damage in hard drive don't allow a hard drive to mount.
Unmounting of hard drive makes it inaccessible and we will not be able to access data stored in hard drive. We may lose all data stored in the hard drive.
In this type of situation we can use a data recovery tool to peform data recovery from the unmountable volumes. There are many data recovery tools available in market that will allow to do recovery of data from an unmounted hard drive.

You can choose the data recovery tool as per your requirements. We should opt for the software which is easy to use and effective to work. Just download the software and install it on Mac.
If the unmounted drive is a external drive then make sure it is properly connected to the Mac.
Then we need to select the drive from the list of drives in the software's interface and run the scanning process to recover data from the unmounted drive.