“the Disk is Unreadable” Error in Mac and Mac Recovery

Sometimes when you try to access external Mac hard drive (Lacie hard drive), you may get the following error message:

“The disk is unreadable: Do you want to initialize it now?”

After this error message, when you try to fix the issue using Disk Utility, you might get the following messages:



Verify and Repair volume “disk1s3”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid node structure
Invalid B-tree node size
Invalid node structure
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: File system verifies or repair failed.


As all these error messages show, there is something wrong with the data structures, library files and profiles of your hard drive. It could be either due to file system corruption or node structure corruption.



As stated in the first error message, the drive is unusable until you initialize it. The drive initialization is a three step process which wipes all the data stored on the hard drive. Its three steps are:

Disk Formatting
Disk Verification
Disk Zeroing


After initialization, you drive will be completely clean, without any data on it. It is the severest loss of your business critical data. Thus, you should never perform disk initialization in such cases.

There could be several reasons behind this problem including file system corruption, iNode corruption, invalid file system or other data structure entries and so forth. To fix all these issues, you need to simply format the drive and install fresh copy of troublesome data structures and other system files.



But, like initialization, formatting also deletes data from your hard drive and may put you in need of Mac data recovery. Mac data recovery is possible with the application of third party data recovery Mac software.



Mac data recovery software carries out the data recovery Mac operation by methodically scanning the entire hard drive and extracting all of the data from it. Mac recovery software do not change the actual data and thus perform original data recovery.



Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery software is the most powerful and the best ever made data recovery Mac software which is capable of handling all of the Mac data loss situations. This Mac data recovery software can recover data from a variety of storage devices including Mac hard drives, Lacie drives, USB drive, FireWire, CD, DVD, Digital camera, memory cards, iPod and many alike.



This Mac recovery software comes equipped with a simple, cool looking and interactive user interface, which lets you do effective and easy data recovery Mac. It is Universal Binary Mac data recovery software which works well on both Intel and Power PC and can perform Mac data recovery for all file versions of Mac OS X including Mac OS X Panther, Tiger and Leopard.