DP Drive damaged, will not appear on desktop

[Timeline]

After plugging my older ST2000 2TB drive in while machine was on, my DP drive with 10 years of tune projects will not mount to desktop. While this is not a MOTU issue I thought Mike or some of you my have ideas to help me.

I have run Disk Drill recovery which took almost a day to accomplish but what came back had no names or folders. Even had it had folders with multiple projects and DP not naming the folders after the project name is entered, there would have been days sorting the data. (I have asked MOTU to add this feature). After explaining to D.D. about my experience I was told by Disk Drill to run a bit copy backup of the drive and try and mount it with their program so I'm about to try that but so far it seems beyond my pay grade to accomplish like learning another program ...

I was also told that if I was a tech type, I could order an ST2000 SATA bridge card controller and swap out the card (15 bucks shipped) but i found out you have to unsolder the bios 8pin chip and swap it into the new replacement card and being surface technology thats again not in my wheelhouse. Also, if bios was flamed from the plugging in stupidity I'm out of business completely and I would not be able to even bit copy the drive. Another thought was to buy the exact same drive and format it on my mac creating the bios on an identical drive card and then swapping it but formatting in Mojave is different than on El Cap OS so I'm sure not about that either. 10 years of compilation in which I do have still some of the older stuff but newer projects are currently history. Comments and help welcomed. thanks

[mikehalloran]

Not enough info but I'll guess. The ST 2000 is an external HHD over USB and you don't have a Time Machine backup. Is this correct? That drive is either failing or has done so (ok, that's not a guess).

You have a multi-drive Mac Pro. Get the drive out of the ST housing and mount it into one of your bays. Now, from the System Drive, run Disk First Aid on that drive until one of two things happen: a) Everything is black and green or b) the exact same warnings in red show up three times in a row—hope that isn't it. If the warning in red changes, you may have to run First Aid 50 times or more—sometimes, it can fix only one problem at a time—but you should eventually be successful.

If (b) happens 3x in a row, you're screwed and there's nothing that Disk Drill can do.

If (a) happens, all your files should be visible. Copy them onto another drive immediately and recycle the old one responsibly.

If you get lucky, set up a decent Time Machine backup and archive your old projects onto more than one backup drive.

Don't spend any more money on Disk Drill. It only works when everything else does. Apple's Disk First Aid is the correct tool here.

[Timeline]

It was always one of the internal mac drive. Thanks for the input.The drive does not appear on the desk and its not seen in first aid.. Right now its out of my machine entirely and I'm just going back to work on new tunes. Thanks for the help MH, GB

P.S. The actual number of the drive is an ST2000MD001 I believe