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pattonalistair

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 16, 2014
3
0
I have a 1 terabyte WD external hard drive, formatted to ExFAT, that I have been using successfully with my Macbook Air for the past year.

Recently any attempt to open the hard drive causes finder to crash repeatedly. It's not plugging the hard drive in that does it, but clicking on the icon to try and open it.

When this happens all icons disappear and a window asking me if I want to "restore windows" pops up. However this window keeps disappearing and reappearing every few seconds as finder repeatedly crashes. The only way to stop the cycle is to shut down the computer and start it again.

In "about this Mac" it seems the OS recognizes the hard drive, and correctly breaks down all the file types. And running "verify" or "repair" in disk utility completes successfully and states there are no problems. Oddly, disk utility does not seem to recognize any files on the hard drive, listing both folders and files as "0", despite correctly recognizing that the hard drive is 80% full.

I plugged the hard drive into a windows xp machine today, it works perfectly, I can see all files and folders, etc. Ran a full virus scan, nothing.

Anyone have any idea what might be causing this?

Much obliged!

Alistair
 

pattonalistair

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 16, 2014
3
0
ExFAT is really prone to corruption since it is not a journaled file system. Can you move the data off of there on the Windows machine then reformat the drive?

This is an option … what file system do you guys recommend that I format this hard drive to?

I'd like to be able to use it on both Mac and Windows machines.

Thank you for your input!
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,071
15,492
California
This is an option … what file system do you guys recommend that I format this hard drive to?

I'd like to be able to use it on both Mac and Windows machines.

Thank you for your input!

If you want to use it on both, I would just erase the drive and reformat to ExFAT.
 

pattonalistair

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 16, 2014
3
0
This problem continues to occur, even on brand new external hard drives, after a month's use or so.

Disk mounts correctly, but double-clicking on it causes finder to crash repeatedly, even when yesterday it was working fine.

Disk utility can still see the hard drive, both verify disk and repair disk find nothing wrong. Hard drive still functions perfectly normally when attached to a Windows machine.

There has got to be something going on here with finder in relation to ExFat mounted external hard drives … does anyone have any insight into this issue??
 

satcomer

Suspended
Feb 19, 2008
9,115
1,973
The Finger Lakes Region
This problem continues to occur, even on brand new external hard drives, after a month's use or so.

Disk mounts correctly, but double-clicking on it causes finder to crash repeatedly, even when yesterday it was working fine.

Disk utility can still see the hard drive, both verify disk and repair disk find nothing wrong. Hard drive still functions perfectly normally when attached to a Windows machine.

There has got to be something going on here with finder in relation to ExFat mounted external hard drives … does anyone have any insight into this issue??

I personally gave up my Windows 7 partition not seeing my HFS+ external media server so on the Windows side I installed MacDrive on the Windows 7 nachine and its been reading,writing to that external with no problem.

As a really old Mac user I believe Windows should bend toward Macintosh!
 
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