External hard drive not reading

If you can, dump the files on the PC, just in case the drive fails.

Then, plug it onto the Mac and run Disk Utility and Repair the drive.

Just a thought...before reformatting or repairing the drive, check the following screenshots:

Try MacDrive and download the trial version to the PC

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

You said at the beginning that when you plugged it into your room-mates PC it appeared in "My Computer" ?

Is this no longer the case ?

Is it because the drive is NTFS? there is a freeware program you can download that will allow your mac to read and write to NTFS. I don't remember what it is called but google and you shall receive

if it shows up on PC, right click it and select "Properties"

If it is NTFS, the mac will should read it, but won't write unless you have third party app installed. There is one I know of on the versiontracker website called "Ntfs for mac" but it costs money for a license.


if it is Mac formatted, the Pc would not recognize it (unless he has installed some third party program). If this is the case, and the mac fails to see it, you could have a dead drive.



If you connect to firewire, and it stops working, you can probably reset the firewire, i'm not sure if this procedure would work with USB, but you can give it a shot and see if the mac picks it up.


-Turn off the mac, unplug everything. Keyboard, mouse, power cord, and if there is a battery, remove it.

-keep it off for about 10-15 minutes, then re-install battery/power, plug in keyboards, mice etc.. Leave the external drive disconnected at the moment.

-Power the mac on, log in, and then plug in the external HDD. If it worked, it should mount to your system shortly.


otherwise I would think the external HDD failed. This assumes there is no response to both mac or Pc when connected. If it works on only the Pc, I would assume there is something wrong with OS X. If this is the case, I would run disk utility (HDD/applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app) and check permissions on the mac HDD, then run "Verify Disk" to see if there are any errors.

Beyond that, I don't know how to fix the problem, if there is one. I would probably backup what I can, and re-format under such circumstances.




edit:
as someone said above:
check the "finder" preferences. Someone may have selected not to show CDs, or HDDs in finder or the desktop. Maybe the system randomly set it as such for unknown reasons.

Open finder, select "finder" then "preferences" it will be in there somewhere.

can you take the drive out of the external case? - plug it into your room mates PC and then see if it picks it up? If the system detects it mac drive should then see it.

Just make sure you have the Jumper settings in the drive correctly set. BY default i believe there on either Master or CS ( cable select)

ied0135 said:

It won't show in either the PC or the Mac, I had it formatted on my Mac and worked fine until I uninstalled the windows partition. Now it doesn't work at all. The light of the HD comes on obviously, but neither computer will recognize that it exists.

The PC has MacDrive installed on it, still not recognizable.

I will try to do the unplug everything method and see if that works even though its USB. Worth a try right? God I cannot lose all my info on here. Ugh this is horrible...

Thanks everyone, I will post my results...

Click to expand...

you uninstalled the windows partition? How exactly did you do that?



It seems that by doing whatever you did to a partition, you somehow corrupted the disk. I cannot think of anything if the computer sees it but fails to read from it properly. The reset method I told you only worked when the firewire was not recognized at all, in disk utility or system profiler.

your disk does show up, however it does not seem to be able to read from it. Maybe you also deleted the small part where it stores the partition, and file system information. IF that were the case, Disk utility should at least be able to format the drive.

My only conclusion to this is that the drive itself is broken. I can think of no way to recover what is on it.



I hope you can find a way, or that someone here knows of a way. The person who suggested to take it out of the case and wire it to a Pc may be on to something, but in my opinion I don't believe it will do much. Not unless the reason for all this is a damaged USB cable or port on the HDD.

Hey don't worry about it, you have to start somewhere!