Can't Access part of my 6 TB USB drive

[Aimireal]

My Mac stopped booting up. It was stuck on the Apple logo, so I installed an OS on the USB drive so I could fix the internal drive. That worked fine until I went to access the USB external drive (6TB) and found out I could not access any other files. Disk Utility shows the files are still on the drive but under the name “Drive Name - Data”.

How do I gain access to the other files?

Thanks in advance.

 

[gilby101]

My Mac

You will get more focused replies if you say what model of Mac and what version of macOS. To clarify your disk configuration it will be useful if you add the output from the Terminal command diskutil list. Also what backups you have.

 

[Fishrrman]

The "USB drive" -- is it a platter-based hard drive?

More recent versions of the Mac OS don't do so well on platter-based drives -- not fast enough. Some won't work as a boot drive at all.

As gilby asks, what Mac do you have? What year was it made? What version of the OS was running?

 

[808?]

My Mac stopped booting up. It was stuck on the Apple logo, so I installed an OS on the USB drive so I could fix the internal drive. That worked fine until I went to access the USB external drive (6TB) and found out I could not access any other files. Disk Utility shows the files are still on the drive but under the name “Drive Name - Data”.

How do I gain access to the other files?

Thanks in advance.

Did you partition the 6TB drive before installing the OS onto the 6Tb drive?

 

[xraydoc]

How is the USB drive formatted? macOS? FAT? NTFS?

 

[Aimireal]

Did you partition the 6TB drive before installing the OS onto the 6Tb drive?

No I didn't.

 

[Aimireal]

The Mac it was attach to when I messed things up was a 2013 cylinder (Trash can) running OS Monterey. It has the 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor.

The Drive is a Seagate Backup+.

Unfortunately it is my backup.

No I didn’t partition it first.


In Disk Utility it shows up:

Disk Name -

Type: APFS Data Volume
Owners: Disabled
Available: 1.24 TB
Connection: USB
Used: 22.92 GB
Device: disk5s5


Disk Name - Data

Type: APFS Data Volume
Owners: Disabled
Available: 1.24 TB
Connection: USB
Used: 4.74 TB
Device: disk5s1

I hope this helps and is not too much information.

Thanks again.

 

[gilby101]

I really was hoping for the output from "diskutil list" Terminal command and that would still be useful. You also haven't said what "My Mac" is. Is it also running Monterey like the 2013 Mac Pro? Is it also an Intel Mac?

But from your screenshot, your Seagate drive appears to have a macOS system in it using Music V and Music V - Data. This is where diskutil output would help to clarify things. And both seem to be mounted.

What do you see if, in Finder or Terminal, you look in /System/Volumes and in /Volumes?

Without more evidence I am just guessing that there is a mismatch between the operating systems on "My Mac" and on the 2013 Mac Pro and in some way this has messed up the mounting of the Music Video - Data volume.

 

[theladyboo]

All of my external drives have died. I have lost so much data that I have stopped using them. It started happening after May of 2025. I stopped using them. I don't have time or the money to test for Apple. They should do it themselves.