I use a 16TB Western Digital drive for Plex storage, and movie files are starting to show as zero bytes. I thought this community could help. Some added details:
- MacOS Sonoma running on M1 Mac Mini
- Western Digital drive (exFAT) 16TB
- Connected via USB-A
- I have tried connecting the drive to another computer… no luck
- Ran the “first aid” program from disk utility. No luck.
Any suggestions?
First of all you don’t run things that irreversibly change the disk you’re trying to recover data from (I mean before making a complete image of the disk). Second you shouldn’t be trying to fix some exFAT file system with a Mac disk utility. Use a Windows machine and chkdsk. For good measure you can do a surface scan too, in case this is where your problems are coming from (HD Tune for example in Windows, badblocks in Linux, I’m sure Mac will have something too).
NEVER do that
yea, sure, kill it completely
But what, run the mac something?! NOTE: everything I recommended is AFTER YOU MADE AN IMAGE OF THE DISK!
Well, if it’s dead already how you can confirm it, at least to take out of circulation?
and what good would chkdsk do on the image?
I wasn’t suggesting to run it on the image, just to have the image for reference before doing unpredictable things you can’t undo, but if you want you can run it there too for a test (even better have a reflinked copy so you can play as much as you like). It’ll just flag/correct if possible whatever inconsistencies you have in the filesystem, with its native tool. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing wrong I guess, as long as you don’t care about the data