How to repair external hard drive that fails diskutil with 'Disk Full Error'

• Perhaps Disk Warrior will be of some help. It's the best for recoverying the volume: http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

• Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks. They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...

• Data Rescue II is the best data recovery software on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive. Data Rescue II works when other tools fail. Data Rescue II is also completely safe to use since it does not attempt any risky repairs to the drive while its scanning.

• FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:

  • been accidentally deleted.
  • become unreadable due to media faults.
  • been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.

Entering:

mac data recovery

into Google will list some firms who specialize in recovering data. Data recovery isn't cheap.

That's a wonderful little deadlock situation the Appleneers apparently did not think of. Here's how I solved it for an external USB drive:

• Install Paragon HFS+ (from http://www.paragon-drivers.com/hfs-windows/ - the trial version suffices) on a Windoze and reboot it.
• Attach the drive and open it in the Explorer.
• Delete some dispensable files to gain some more space on the drive.
• You likely need to empty its local Trash.
• Unplug the drive (I could not find a way to cleanly eject)
• Attach the drive to your Mac, and it should automatically try again to fix the file system, this time hopefully with success.