You can believe this or not, but I appear to be experiencing my first crashed HDD in (checks notes - actually my notes don’t go back that far). I am going to say I’ve never had an HDD or SSD fail. I bought our first Apple computer in 2009 (still with us, and fully functional) and AFAIK I still have every external or internal disk I bought since then. Heck, I still have some HDDs from my PC days. The internal HDD from our second (2011) Mac is still being used daily.
Needless to say, I have no experience in recovering data from an unmountable disk. This WD Blue 4TB drive shows on the Disk Utility but will not mount. Luckily in this case, it is a Time Machine drive, so other than some earlier versioned files, there is no unique data here (I back up with CCC and Backblaze also). I’m not out on a limb; I don’t need to recover this data.
But being as geeky (and cheap) as I am, I see this as an opportunity for an exercise in recovery, and a chance to employ Disk Drill for the effort (thanks Setapp!) I ran the scan function in DD and it gave me this report:
Sure, I could possibly figure out what this means, but in case anyone confidently understands this, I’d appreciate a translation.