I accidentally deleted an HFS partition on my Mac drive and now I can’t access important files. I haven’t formatted or written new data to the disk yet, but I’m not sure what recovery steps are safest. What’s the best way to recover data from a deleted HFS partition without making things worse?
First thing: stop using the drive for now. With old HFS or HFS+ external drives, deleted files are often still sitting there until something new overwrites them. So the less you do to the disk, the better your odds.
I’ve had decent luck recovering data from HFS drives before, including cases where Finder wouldn’t mount the volume anymore. It’s stressful, especially if the drive has old photos or documents on it, but accidental deletion by itself doesn’t automatically mean the files are gone.
Check the drive before scanning it
Before you throw recovery software at it, do a quick sanity check:
- See if the drive still shows up in Disk Utility.
- If it’s external, try a different USB cable and another port.
- Check SMART status if your enclosure allows it.
- If the drive is dropping out, reading painfully slowly, or showing lots of bad sectors, don’t keep scanning it repeatedly.
If the drive seems unstable, making a disk image first is usually the safer move. That gives you something to scan without beating up the original drive any more than necessary.
What I’d use for HFS/HFS+ recovery
For this kind of thing, I usually point people toward Disk Drill. It handles HFS and HFS+ volumes pretty well, and it can sometimes scan drives that macOS won’t open in Finder, as long as Disk Utility can still see the device.
The basic process is simple enough:
- Install Disk Drill somewhere other than the drive you’re trying to recover from.
- Pick the HFS or HFS+ drive in the app.
- Choose Search for Lost Data. For most external disks, Universal Scan is the option I’d use.
- Let the scan finish instead of stopping it halfway through.
- Preview the important files before recovering them.
- Save the recovered files to a different healthy drive, not back onto the original one.
If you emptied the Trash or quick-formatted it
That still might be recoverable. Emptying the Trash or doing a quick format usually removes file references, but the actual file contents may remain until overwritten. That’s why continuing to copy files to the drive is the worst thing you can do right now.
Also, if you have a Time Machine backup, check that first. Restoring from a backup is cleaner and usually much less painful than doing file recovery.
When to stop trying yourself
I wouldn’t keep running scans if the drive is acting physically bad. Stuff like clicking, grinding, buzzing, constant disconnects, freezing the Mac, disappearing from Disk Utility, or scans failing with read errors usually points to hardware problems.
At that point, more DIY attempts can make things worse. If the data matters enough, a professional recovery lab is the safer route.
But if the drive is still detected and it’s mostly a deletion, Trash, quick format, or file system issue, recovery software is worth trying before doing anything that writes to the disk. That approach has worked for me more than once.
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Make a full byte-for-byte image of the whole physical disk before trying to “repair” anything. Not the missing volume, not just the visible partition, the entire device. A deleted partition is often a partition map problem, and tools that try to rebuild or “fix” that map can write changes back to the disk. That might work, but it is not the first move I’d make when the files matter.
I agree with the earlier point about stopping use of the drive, but I’d be more cautious about scanning the original disk directly. Recovery scans are mostly read-only, but they can take hours and they stress a weak drive. If the disk is healthy, image it to another drive with enough space, then scan the image. If the disk is acting weird, use something that can handle read errors better, or stop and consider a lab.
Disk Drill may be fine for browsing recoverable files, especially if you want a GUI and previews, but don’t let any recovery app save results back to that same Mac drive. Save to a separate disk only. And avoid Disk Utility’s “First Aid” for now unless you already have an image. First Aid is meant to repair a filesystem, not preserve evidence, and on a damaged or missing HFS/HFS+ partition it can make the situation messier.
A deleted partition entry is a much better situation than a drive that was reformatted and reused, but it is also easier to mess up by “helpfully” recreating the partition in Disk Utility. If you make a new HFS partition in the same empty space, macOS may write fresh filesystem structures there, and that can overwrite the old catalog or volume header area. So don’t create a replacement partition just to see if it mounts.
I’m with @suenodelbosque on imaging the whole device first. After that, the safer path is to inspect the image for the old partition start and size. Tools like TestDisk can sometimes find the lost HFS/HFS+ partition entry and rebuild the partition map, but I would not let it write changes to the original disk. If it finds a likely HFS volume, note the sector numbers, save screenshots or a log, and work on the clone/image. The exact boundaries matter here.
Disk Drill or similar recovery software is fine if your goal is to pull files out rather than restore the partition itself. Just expect that folder names and structure may depend on how intact the HFS catalog still is. If the catalog is damaged, you may get raw recovered files with worse names or missing folders. That is still better than gambling with First Aid or repartitioning the original drive. The boring order is: stop using it, image it, scan the image, recover to a separate disk, then think about repairing or rebuilding only after the important files are somewhere safe.
Do not click “Initialize,” “Erase,” or “Partition” when macOS offers to fix the disk. That prompt is not a recovery tool. It usually means macOS sees a device but not a mountable volume, and letting it “set up” the disk can write a new partition map over the evidence you need.
The missing detail here is whether this was a plain HFS/HFS+ partition or something wrapped in CoreStorage/FileVault. If encryption was involved, the recovery order changes a bit. You still image the whole device first, but you also need the password or recovery key, and a file-carving scan may give you nothing useful because encrypted data looks like random noise. In that case, finding the old partition/container boundaries matters more than running a generic file scan.
Before doing anything fancy, I’d take a couple of read-only notes: what diskutil list shows now, the physical disk identifier, the reported disk size, and whether it is GPT or Apple Partition Map. Don’t “fix” based on those notes yet. They’re just there so you don’t lose track of which disk is which, especially if you attach another drive for imaging. People make a bad situation worse by cloning the blank target over the source. Label the drives if you have to.
I mostly agree with the image-first advice above, but I’d be careful with the word “scan.” Scanning an image is safe. Scanning the original is usually okay on a healthy disk, but it is still hours of reads, and if the drive is old or flaky that can be the difference between “recoverable” and “now it disconnects every five minutes.” If the files are valuable, use a tool that can make a clone while skipping bad areas and coming back to them later. A normal Finder copy or Disk Utility image is less forgiving when a disk has read errors.
Disk Drill is reasonable if you want a GUI and previews, especially after you have an image. I would treat it as a file recovery tool, not as the first authority on rewriting the partition table. If it finds your folders intact, recover them to a different drive and call that the win. Restoring the deleted partition so it mounts again is nice, but it is a secondary goal. The safest “best result” is having the important files copied somewhere else before anyone tries to make the original disk look normal again.