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external hard drive stopped working on OS X, still works in windows

E

enginerd

macrumors member
Original poster
I have an iBook G4 running 10.3.8 with an external USB 2.0 hard drive formatted with fat32. While copying photos from the mac to the drive, it froze and I had to force quit. Now, the mac doesn't detect the drive at all. It doesn't show up in Disk Utiliy or System Info--instead these programs seem to be trying to detect the drive, but it just hangs with the spinning ball. If the mac is booted with the drive connected, it will hang during the disk detection phase until the drive is disconnected.

I tried connecting the drive to a PC and presto, everything's there and it works fine. Anybody know how to get OS X to work with the drive again??? 😕
 
enginerd said:
I have an iBook G4 running 10.3.8 with an external USB 2.0 hard drive formatted with fat32. While copying photos from the mac to the drive, it froze and I had to force quit. Now, the mac doesn't detect the drive at all. It doesn't show up in Disk Utiliy or System Info--instead these programs seem to be trying to detect the drive, but it just hangs with the spinning ball. If the mac is booted with the drive connected, it will hang during the disk detection phase until the drive is disconnected.

I tried connecting the drive to a PC and presto, everything's there and it works fine. Anybody know how to get OS X to work with the drive again??? 😕
Click to expand...

Try running a disk utility on it from Windows or reformatting it under Windows.
 
Update: connecting the drive to a PC and just copying a file to it, disconnecting and reconnecting it to the mac got it working again. Strange, but that's what happened.
 
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