HELP! My external harddrive cannot been seen

[fansub]

after trying to mount my external harddrive on vista i rebooted in os x and i got the message that the "drive could not be mounted because it could not be recognized"
i didnt format it in vista, only changed the partition type to MBR. logging back into os x i was asked if i wanted to re initialize.
i DO NOT want to lose the stuff on this harddrive, 30 gb of music has taken me a long time a compile, plus all my work stuff ect

 

[mad jew]

Weird. Will Disk Utility let you either force a mount, or change the partition map back? I would've thought it'd mount fine with MBR though.

 

[fansub]

cant do either, i ran data rescue and it finds files, but with no names. there must be some way i can get things back!
evil vista trying to destroy all things alien

 

[mad jew]

Well, can Vista mount it or work with it in any way?

 

[fansub]

it requests format when exploring as it is formatted in macs file system. but it does mount

 

[mad jew]

Will it let you change the partition map back then? Just out of interest, if it's an HFS disk, why'd you change the partition map to MBR?

 

[JNB]

after trying to mount my external harddrive on vista i rebooted in os x and i got the message that the "drive could not be mounted because it could not be recognized"
i didnt format it in vista, only changed the partition type to MBR. logging back into os x i was asked if i wanted to re initialize.
i DO NOT want to lose the stuff on this harddrive, 30 gb of music has taken me a long time a compile, plus all my work stuff ect

Of course the Mac couldn't see it properly. Macs see Apple and GUID Partition maps. Anything else, they don't recognize, If you changed the partition type, then the partition table has likely been mucked up beyond repair, though it's late and I could be completely wrong.

FYI, Windows can read/write to HFS+ (Mac) volumes, but Macs can read/write only to FAT32 volumes, not NTFS (read-only in that case). There should be no reason to alter the existing partition type.

Farging Vista strikes again.

 

[fansub]

i cant change it back unless i format, it was GUID, for some reason vista would not mount the drive that was the reason for the change.
if windows reads from HFS file systems then how come i cant R/W from/to the drive in vista?
much appreciated

 

[JNB]

Well, the data is still there, but neither system has a clue how to find it. DO NOT REFORMAT THAT DISC! It's like being handed a book with the Table of Contents torn out, or entering a library where the card catalog has just been burned.

Professional data recovery services are way expensive, but they do work. I don't know of any DIY utilities, but I haven't had the need in more than a few years.

 

[fansub]

i used data rescue to do a through scan of the external harddrive but didnt let it complete (3-4 hours) because i wanted to see what kinda data it could pull off. it did start to grab things but without the file names, renaming would take alot of effort and time