External Hard Drive Won't Mount. HELP!!

[Ross Thomas]

Hi All Y'all Out In Cyber World!

I am writing because I am desperately in need of HELP!

I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, running on OS X Yosemite.

I recently was working on a TV show in Hawaii and I used a brand new Toshiba Canvio Connect 1.0 TB External Hard Drive to store the footage I shot. Initially when I would connect the hard drive to my Macbook Pro, it would recognize it just fine and I could access my footage. Then some time went by and I updated my Macbook Pro to Yosemite. Now when I plug the external hard drive in, the computer does not recognize it and nothing pops up. If I go into Disk Utility, I can see the Toshiba Hard Drive in the column on the left, but it is greyed out and says, "not mounted". However, when I plug it into my wife's Mac, it reads it just fine.

I have read tons of stuff online and could not figure out what's wrong. So I decided to take it to the Mac store Genius bar. Every single Genius tech had no idea what was wrong. The drive worked on all of their machines just fine. They said they had never seen anything like it before. I asked to have the best techie in the store look at it and even he could not figure it out. They tried a bazillion different diagnostics and nada! They said there is nothing wrong with my Mac and nothing wrong with the Hard Drive. My computer just does not want to mount it. They said it had to be some weird software issue with my computer not recognizing it. Surely there has to be a way to fix this! Please tell me one of you are smarter than the Mac Store Genius'?? HELP!!!

I don't need to run a repair on the hard drive, because there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. And I can't reformat the hard drive, because I can't lose all this footage I shot.

Any insight, advice or troubleshooting is GREATLY appreciated!!

Warmest Regards

 

[eyoungren]

You can't click on the drive in Disk Utility to select it and then press the button that says 'Mount'?

If you tried that already then I missed it. All you said was the drive was grayed out. Usually in DU that's not because you can't work with it (such as mounting it), just an indicator that it's not mounted.

Alternatively, if the data is so important and the drive mounts to your wife's Mac, why not copy it over and then copy it back to a drive you know will mount on your Mac. I mean, if you need to get work done or something.

 

[Ross Thomas]

I clicked it and pressed mount, but I got the following error message:

 

[Ross Thomas]

I clicked it and pressed mount, but I got the following error message:

I can't copy over to my wife's computer because she doesn't have enough space. It is a TB worth of footage. Only thing I could do would be buy a new TB drive and copy over to that, but that would take all night and cost $$. That is why I am trying to troubleshoot here first, to see if I can avoid that.

 

[glenthompson]

I can't copy over to my wife's computer because she doesn't have enough space. It is a TB worth of footage. Only thing I could do would be buy a new TB drive and copy over to that, but that would take all night and cost $$. That is why I am trying to troubleshoot here first, to see if I can avoid that.

The more you screw around with it the greater the chance you will damage the data on it. If the data is important enough just bite the bullet and make a new copy. Yes, it will take most of a day but you can let the copy work while doing other stuff.

 

[simonsi]

The shoot was professional by the sound of it? In that case you should already have a second copy made as soon as possible after the shoot, this is getting stressful because you are working with the sole copy.

Go and buy TWO 1TB drives and make 2 further copies via your wife's MAC, you can copy from one USB drive to another, not the fastest but it won't consume and disk space on your wife's machine either.

Once you have TWO secure further copies you can address the original problem, if necessary format and copy back from one of the copies to the working copy drive from which you can do your editing etc.

Once that is done take one of the copies to a friends/relatives/business address to prevent fire/flood/theft loss.

THAT is professional-level data security as a minimum, until then you are at risk from losing the footage from any number of causes...