I have an old Iomega external HDD formatted for use on a Mac, however it's been going out. I decided to get a Western Digital external HDD to replace it. After getting around the crummy WD software which refused to format the drive, I was ready to transfer data. I was using my mac to do so, and had pulled the Iomega (Seagate) HDD out of it's enclosure, just assuming off the start that the enclosure itself was causing the reliability issues since the D/C jack was loose. After using a Sata to USB connector, the drive still didn't show up.
I then decided to boot into Ubuntu to transfer the data there. The Seagate showed up momentarily, but the WD was write protected while in Linux for some reason. I booted back to the MacOS, reformatted the WD, and when I went back to Linux the WD still was read only, but my main concern was that the Seagate didn't show up at all. I looked at the disk utility and it showed the SATA to USB connection, but no HDD. Booting back to Mac (since Linux failed to copy any file to the WD at all) I opened the disk utility there. It showed the drive as being grayed out (unmounted). So when I tried to mount, it would fail saying it needed to run First Aid. I tried several times, but it always failed, suggesting I backup data and format the drive. Of course, I still can't get INTO the drive to backup the data.
That was where I left off. My only other attempt at this will be to directly connect the two HDDs to my desktop and attempt a transfer that way. That would be great assuming it's just my SATA to USB connector acting up. But I'd still be fronted with a WD that can't be copied to. Haven't tried formatting to FAT32, just HFS+.
So my question, before I can attempt this, what is the best route to take here? Any distro of Linux for a LiveCD I can use to make this easy? Any special bootable disk like GParted to transfer data between two drives?
Any help is appreciated, thanks!
I then decided to boot into Ubuntu to transfer the data there. The Seagate showed up momentarily, but the WD was write protected while in Linux for some reason. I booted back to the MacOS, reformatted the WD, and when I went back to Linux the WD still was read only, but my main concern was that the Seagate didn't show up at all. I looked at the disk utility and it showed the SATA to USB connection, but no HDD. Booting back to Mac (since Linux failed to copy any file to the WD at all) I opened the disk utility there. It showed the drive as being grayed out (unmounted). So when I tried to mount, it would fail saying it needed to run First Aid. I tried several times, but it always failed, suggesting I backup data and format the drive. Of course, I still can't get INTO the drive to backup the data.
That was where I left off. My only other attempt at this will be to directly connect the two HDDs to my desktop and attempt a transfer that way. That would be great assuming it's just my SATA to USB connector acting up. But I'd still be fronted with a WD that can't be copied to. Haven't tried formatting to FAT32, just HFS+.
So my question, before I can attempt this, what is the best route to take here? Any distro of Linux for a LiveCD I can use to make this easy? Any special bootable disk like GParted to transfer data between two drives?
Any help is appreciated, thanks!
