So I made the stupid mistake of try to read my external hard drives on a Windows 7 machine and now my MBP can no longer recognized the drives? Any software or other options to fix this? I have all my media on my drives! Your help would be greatly appreciated!
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- Thread starter rlolson2
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"So I made the stupid mistake of try to read my external hard drives on a Windows 7 machine and now my MBP can no longer recognized the drives? Any software or other options to fix this? I have all my media on my drives! Your help would be greatly appreciated!"
If worse comes to worse, and nothing else seems to be working, I'd suggest one of the "data recovery" apps for Mac, such as:
- DataRescue3
- Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery
- Disk Drill
These _are_ "pay for" apps, and you WILL need to buy ANOTHER (Mac-formatted) hard drive to use as a "scratch drive" during the recovery process.
Last ditch effort would be to take the non-working drive, and re-intialize it (yes, you read that correctly), and THEN use one of the data recovery apps to scavenge and rebuild the data files on it. Remember that re-initializing "wipes out" ONLY the directory on the drive, and does not disturb the data (unless you choose to "zero out" the drive during initialization, DO NOT do this!). This worked for me one time with a partition that would not mount. I reinitialized the drive, ran DataRescue on it, and it found and retrieved my data.
Final thoughts:
If you have Mac-created data that is important to you, DO NOT (shouting intentional) trust it to a drive that is initialized to work with both the PC and Mac. You have just seen what can happen when one chooses to do that.
Instead, keep treasured Mac data on a "Mac-formatted ONLY" drive. DO NOT "share" that drive with PC's! Do your "sharing" with other drives.
If worse comes to worse, and nothing else seems to be working, I'd suggest one of the "data recovery" apps for Mac, such as:
- DataRescue3
- Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery
- Disk Drill
These _are_ "pay for" apps, and you WILL need to buy ANOTHER (Mac-formatted) hard drive to use as a "scratch drive" during the recovery process.
Last ditch effort would be to take the non-working drive, and re-intialize it (yes, you read that correctly), and THEN use one of the data recovery apps to scavenge and rebuild the data files on it. Remember that re-initializing "wipes out" ONLY the directory on the drive, and does not disturb the data (unless you choose to "zero out" the drive during initialization, DO NOT do this!). This worked for me one time with a partition that would not mount. I reinitialized the drive, ran DataRescue on it, and it found and retrieved my data.
Final thoughts:
If you have Mac-created data that is important to you, DO NOT (shouting intentional) trust it to a drive that is initialized to work with both the PC and Mac. You have just seen what can happen when one chooses to do that.
Instead, keep treasured Mac data on a "Mac-formatted ONLY" drive. DO NOT "share" that drive with PC's! Do your "sharing" with other drives.