Can't access external USB Drive

I have a Seagate external USB drive that I'm trying to access. This drive has not been used in awhile, but as far as I know it ok.
When I plug it into my G4, and power it up, it never comes up on the desktop. Instead, I get a message saying "the disk you have inserted is not readable by this computer", and gives me the choice of "initialize", "ignore", or "eject".
This drive has worked in the near past. Why do I now not seem to be able to access the data on it?
I tried a "restart" with the external drive hooked up, but get the same message. I really don't think the drive is bad.
Is there any way I can force the computer to recognize an external drive?
Note: System Profiler sees the drive, but it just never mounts.

Hi Japamac, good to speak with you again. You have helped me in the past.
Sorry for the repeated posts in multiple forums. I've been desperately trying to figure this out, and was looking for maximum views of my problem.
A couple of days ago, I was able to get this drive to mount making me believe that is (was?) formatted for Mac. Nothing that I know of has changed since then except that now the drive will not mount.
Disk Utility sees the drive, but verify disk and all other choices are greyed out. Clicking on "mount disk" also has no affect.
Under disk utility, I clicked on the "info" tab for the external drive, and under "Partition type" it says "WindowsFat32" but I don't know what might account for that if the drive is Mac formatted.
My primary concern is if the data on this disk is still ok. If it can still be accessed on a PC, I can get together with a PC owner this weekend.

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Can i include external usb drives in Time Machine backups

Can I include external usb drives and sticks in Time Machine backups?
This was the question I searched a week for. My machine is a MBAir with Yosemite. I have a bunch of USB HD and sticks. This is a sharing of what it took to solve. I lost a couple of important document revisions lately because of not having differential backups on them, so wanted to include them in Time Machine.
Yes it can, I found. But it's a wee bit backwards. And apparent inconsistencies drive you crazy. Time Machine is supposed to do this by default, and wants you to tell it what NOT to include. Trouble is, formats create many troubles.
But the USB sticks and HD's you buy are PC formatted. And you'd like to share, as the Apple does with FAT16, FAT32, and exFAT (to overcome the 4G size limit on the others). Even NTFS can be plugged in and be read-only. Turns out you just can't incorporate into TM backups.
Open Time Machine Options, and look at the drives listed in the exclusion window. Drives that you know to be plugged in and registered by Finder, may or not be registered in the exclusion window, and if registered and their icons may be bright or dimmed. Bright will NOT be included. Dimmed are excluded. Normally the operation is to use the or to exclude these drives from your next BU operation. (this instruction is lost the next time in manual mode). So if a drive or stick is shown and is bright it WON'T be backed up. If you it from the window, then it will grey out and WILL be backed up. If it's not there to offer you exclusion, you can browse to such a file or device so you can exclude it. TM's exclusion window will show the PC formats: FAT16, FAT32, and exFAT greyed out (as not included). NTFS is bright looking like it might work, but when doesn't dim, it disappears, and is ignored in the actual BU.
Sources are supposed to be included in the backup if it isn't shown bright in the exclusion window. In this respect I only use TM manually, and not for programmed BU's, so I cannot speak to that.
If everything you have is formatted for the Apple disc system (Mac OS Extended) then there are no contradictions or partial equivalences. The mounted disc or stick will show in TM exclusions window, and if you it, you'll see it in the Time Machine pile of calendared directories, with all the files. And of course it will do the differential backups for it that we use TM for in the first place. Just remember to prepare the BU by not excluding.
BUT NOW THE VARIABLES. It now depends upon the formats. I use the Paragon NTFS program to permit writing NTFS. (Apple can normally read but not write NTFS). Paragon is lovely because for normal computer use, I can read and write both Apple and PC files and disc formats in Finder (for 3 years now). But Time Machine cannot be reached by Paragon so it's NTFS behaviors are outrageous. Paragon reaches Disk Doctor so you can read, write, format and heal both Apple and PC formats. And this really confused things respecting Time Machine. I literally worked through every variable, from stick to disc to prove what did work, and when false appearances of working showed up.
Respecting that very Time Machine display of Finder windows piled backwards through time there's a confusing bug. When first opened, TM shows NOW as the current setup and works just like a Finder window in present time. And the outboard discs and sticks show as in Finder. BUT working back in time, the left window DOES NOT SHOW THE CONDITIONS AT BACKUP but rather in all left windows shows the present setup. So you need to work from the right hand side dates and times to go back and see when you had that stick or HD plugged in. And then, finally, you will see the files you wanted saved. But if there is a stick on the left than TM doesn't like but Finder likes you'll see it left but nothing will be in the files. Clicking on the pretender just jumps to the root.
My Disk Doctor provisions (with Paragon) show, Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive Journaled), MS-DOS (FAT), exFAT, Windows NT Filesystem, Windows NT Filesystem (compressed). It's a better utility than in Microsoft and I use it for such maintenance.
Bottom line, I like TM very much. 2 years ago I lost my air and TM was able to reconstruct my machine many times in the course of the troubleshooting - all the way from the start to the last without ever missing a beat or a file. So I accept this limitation and make copies to another HD formatted in NTFS when I work on PCs.
Hope's this sorts out being lost in the desert for a few of you.
Jock
<Personal Information Edited by Host>

Storing normal data files on the Time Capsule is unfortunately not as easy as dropping the folder on the Time Capsule.
Open up Macintosh HD on the Mac
Look for the SHARED heading on the left
Click on the Time Capsule icon and a folder named "Data" will appear (unless you have renamed it)
Double click the "Data" folder to mount the drive on the desktop. You may need to enter the device password for the Time Capsule when you do this the first time
Once the drive icon is on the desktop, you can drag data to the icon and drop it there. Double click the icon to open up the drive and see the files

Can't Access any USB drive

I just installed Windows 10, and untill now all is working fine except for the fact that I can't access any USB Drive or PEN.
When I try I always get the following message:
this operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer
How can I fix this BUG.

Hi,
I don’t think it’s a bug, it could be driver or settings issues.
Please run rsop.msc to see if there is any related Group policy was configured to block USB device.
First I would like to confirm with you that expect USB drive, if other USB device can be recognized fine.
If not, I recommend you to update or reinstall the USB controller under Device manager.
If this issue only happened on USB drive, let’s try following suggestions:
Suggestion 1: Check hidden device drivers
Unplug your USB storage device.
Type CMD in Start Search.
Right click cmd.exe and select
Run as administrator. Click Yes if the User Access Control box pops up.
At the Command Prompt window, type
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 and press the Enter key.
Using the same Command Prompt window, type
devmgmt.msc to bring out the Device Manager.
At the Device Manager top menu, click
View and select Show hidden devices.
Browse down to the Universal Serial Bus controllers and click the
+ to expand the list.
Probably you will see some light grey devices, e.g. USB Mass Storage Device or USB Composite Device. Right click each and every light grey devices and select Uninstall. This will remove whatever "hardware profile" linked
to your USB storage.
Attached your USB storage device and see if it works.
Suggestion 2: Check if the drive can be recognized under Disk management:
Right click the Start icon and choose Disk management.
If you can find your USB drive there but there’s no in File explorer, follow these steps.
Run cmd as admin, type following commands to enable automount feature:
Diskpart
automount enable
Details for this command:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753703.aspx
Then try to assign letter for your USB drive again by using commands below:
Run cmd as admin, type following commands:
Diskpart
list volume
sel volume x [x present the volume number of your USB drive]
assign letter=g:
Another thing is if you use USB3.0 to connect the drive, change it to USB 2.0 to see what's going on.
Kate Li
TechNet Community Support

Unable to access external USB drive on my windows machine

I have an XP SP2 box with several partitions. I Just purchased a MacMini (fisrt time apple user). I have joined the maac to the same workgroup as the XP box and can access all the partitions on the XP box with no problem. With the exception of the C: drive and the External USB drive.
I have the drive at Fat32 and can connect directly to the mac with no problems. Read, write all works fine. connect back to the XP box and I get an error -43. It ask for a user name and password and knows if I use the wrong password. I can even see a list of shares on the sub folders of the external drive but get the error when I try to access.
Thanks in advance
Mac mini Mac OS X (10.4.4)

This could be a smart design inside XP. FAT32 can't store file ownership so maybe it refuses to share a FAT format drve? From a security point of view this would be the right thing to do. On the other hand it could be a bug in XP that just by dumb lock looks like it is doing the right thing.
Either way it sounds like you have a good workaround: put the drive on the Mac and let the Mac share the drive. It's best if the drive is reformatted for the Mac so that user ownership and permissons can be used.
Don't worry one computer can't know how another's dive is formatted. The network hides this. All my shared files are on EXT3 formatted drives on a Linux server. All the clients see is "SBM".

Suddenly can't share external USB drive

I have all of my iTunes music on an external USB drive called 'iTunes_Drive', attached to my G5 iMac in the basement. For a long time, my wife would just run iTunes on the G4 iMac in the living room and play music through the Shared Libraries feature. However, this is slow to start up each day, so I came up with the idea of just sharing the external drive, and having her maintain her own library based on the music in the shared drive.
Just today, it became impossible to access this shared drive from the G4. Interestingly, when I shared a FireWire external drive with the same settings, then that drive WAS visible as an available shared folder when connecting from the G4.
Rebooting both computers hasn't changed anything. The firewall on the G5 is turned off, and it's allowing AFP, SMB and FTP sharing of the drive. The G4 CAN mount the iTunes_Drive using SMB, but iTunes doesn't recognize it as the same drive (possibly because under SMB it's called "ITUNES_DRIVE:" whereas in AFP it's "iTunes_Drive").
Is there something new in security which is preventing AFP sharing of external USB drives? Neither googling nor searching through this forum has turned up anything that helps me.
I should note that the G5 is running Leopard 10.5.1, and the G4 is running Tiger 10.4.11, and I just ran Software Update on both computers last night, with the attendant reboots this morning.

I've experienced a similar problem with my two external hard drives connected to my AirPort Extreme Base. Since installing yesterday's security update, I can no longer see either hard drive. From my Shared folder in Finder, it's now constantly in 'Connecting' mode. I've tried rebooting and checking everything to no avail.
Any help out there would be appreciated.

Can't access a USB Drive connected to Time Capsule from a Windows PC. Apple Care can't/won't assist. HELP!!!

Trying to get my Windows 7 PC to access the USB Drive that is connected to my Time Capsule. I have a Fat32 Formatted USB drive connected to a 2TB Time Capsule and I'm trying to get access to that drive from a Windows 7 PC. I've attempted to map the network drive (based on some 3-4 year old articles I could find online) but any time I access a file from the PC, the Time Capsule "freaks out" and disconnects all connections to it which forces me to unplug it to restart the Tim Capsule. I'm at a loss now as to what to do.
Spent a few hours talking to Apple about this and much more. Apple Care can't or won't help with this particular problem (the guy I talked to, as nice and helpful as he wanted to be, had no experience supporting their hardware in a Windows environment).
Someone has to know how to fix this so, PLEASE, help if you can!

First off, Archon23, what you want to achieve is possible. I have access to both my Time Capsule (TC) and the USB drive connected to it, from a Win. 7 and Win. XP machine.
Here is what I see from the Windows side of things:
     From My Computer - TC USB Drive (Y)
     From Windows HomeNet - Time Capsule:
Now getting there is the trick.
One caveat before proceeding: I am not well versed in Windows Networks, Windows Sharing and Firewall settings so some of the following may not be elegant, may not be absolutely required, and may not be the best way of getting there. But it is what I did to see both the TC drive and it's attached USB drive on the Windows side of my network..
1.) First, I added Airport Utility to the Inbound rules of Win 7 Firewall
While poking around my Network Sharing and Firewall settings trying to figure this out, I got a Pop-up recommending I do that. AND I did that. Oh, and while you are at it, make sure you have a Home network established.
2.) Next, on a hunch, I installed a USB Wi-Fi Adapter (under $20) to my Win PC, enabled that Wi-Fi connection and disabled my Ethernet connection. I was getting no where on this matter with my Ethernet connection to a DSL Gateway. But with a Wi-Fi connection to my AirPort Express Base Station, I made progress.
3.) Finally, while poking around my Network Sharing Center some more, one by one I started the various network device Setup Wizards in there, and Trouble Shooters, to find the elusive TC/USB devices in question...AND voila, it worked.   And it's stable, been this way for going on two weeks now.
Good luck.

Can't find external USB drive

Okay, I can't figure out why or exactly when it occured, but I realized I can't access my external LaCie drive through my Airport Extreme. I never had any problems with it before, but maybe after installing an update or something, it has now made it inaccessable. I can see the drive in the Airport Utility, but when I can't mount it onto the desktop or use it at all. When the Airport Disk Utility tells me that its available and I try to connect to it, it tells me "Connection Failed". Also, if I try to connect to it through the Finder, it tells me it can't locate the alias for the Aiport base station to which I have the drive connected. It all totally confuses me. I can't really tell where the problem lies. I'm having no problem connecting to the internet through the Airport, but I can't mount the drive from it. Aargh!

Hi John, and welcome to the discussions!
For the busted alias, might try...
Finder>Preferences>Sidebar>Show Network Icon... toggle this OFF then On... sometimes a re-boot between the two helps.
But first, use Disk Utility to repair permissions... a good idea both before and after any update/upgrade.

Can't use external USB Drive

Hello
I have 500 GB Hitachi usb drive , it was working fine until now, i can see the disk in disk utility, but i can't format it. I tried to repair the partition but it failed, now the partition dissapear but i still can see the disk in disk utility list, when i try to format it, after few minutes i get this:
Disk Erase failed with the error:
Couldn’t open device."
and previously i got this when formatting partition only:
Disk Erase failed with the error:
Couldn’t open device."

For SMART checking, I understand that has been a problem with external drives.
Looks like there may be a combination solution here and here.
Any help from drive manufacturer site?
Have you reformated it before? Some drive mfrs write invisible partitions for Windows.
I had one drive once which I had to reformat as FAT32 and erase before I could reformat as Mac OS Extended.

Can I swap external usb drives to keep a backup offsite?

I'm switching to a mac and I want to keep 2 usb drives for backup. One drive for hooked up doing the current backup and a second to put in it's place (probably weekly) to maintain a backup offsite.
Aside from the obvious changes week to week, can Time Capsule/Time Machine be set up for something like this. I'd like to know before I spend $500+ on hardware.
If this won't work, do you have any suggestions?

Time Machine is an extremely complex piece of software.. far more so than I first imagined.
It is well worth reading the Pondini KB to understand what it does and how.
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html is very useful. Troubleshooting.
But he has more info under the home about what TM does. It is helpful to understand it .. even if just skimming, so you know where to look.
http://pondini.org/TM/Home.html
I will also make a recommendation that you do a disk image or disk clone with a different software. It can still be loaded onto the USB drives.. and it doesn't need to be done often. But it will get you out of trouble quickly.. and there are excellent free ones.. I think superduper will do a full disk image.. from inside the Mac OS.. but I would use a tool like clonezilla.. free download linux based tool but with simple menus.. (you don't have to recompile the kernel). That is on a bootable CD or USB stick. That means if things break you are quickly back to exactly where and when the image was taken.. TM can then get back the incremental backups.

Can I access my USB drive connected to 3rd Gen Extreme via the internet?

After reading the features of current Airport Extremes, it seems that one can acces their USB connected hard drive via the internet. Is this true and does that feature also exist on 3rd Gen extremes as well? If so, how do I access it via the internet?

Yes and yes. Please check out the following AirPort User Tip.

IPhoto won't open, can't access external hard drive

I have recently had to re-install my OSX Tiger software and while troubleshooting I unplugged my external LaCie harddrive (with my iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie files). Now that I have re-installed my OS, I can't open iPhoto at all, though I can see that the photos are still on the external drive. I dragged my iTunes music folder to my iTunes library and this seemed to do the trick. However, I can't open iPhoto at all, and I am hesitant to start moving iPhoto stuff around b/c I know you should only access photos directly from iPhoto.
Any suggestions?

I tried holding down the option key and it opened normally. When I say "normally" I mean what it has been doing recently which is opening the iPhoto toolbar, but nothing on the rest of the screen. If I try to open an image by navigating to it through the external drive in finder it opens in preview.
I did an arhive and install and saved my preferences and settings. Do you think I need to also re-install iLife?
Thanks-

Can't access external hard drive

I've been using a LaCie external drive with my iBook G4 for a couple of years. Suddenly, the icon no longer shows up on my desktop even though it's still recognized by the System Profiler. I have not been able to access any files in the external HD. I tried trashing all my preferences and rebooting, but that didn't resolve the problem. I also tried switching the FireWire cable but same result. Any suggestions?

You might enjoy this DiskWarrior review/recommendation...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9645801&#9645801
If DiskWarrior can't fix it, you might try Data Rescue II...
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
(Has a Free Demo to see if it could or not, but you'll need another drive to recover to).
Or FileSalvage...
http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?%20mainpage=product_info&productsid=1
to recover what you can.

Can't connect external usb drive

I bought a WD mybook essential 500gb drive to use with my macbook pro. It worked for about a day, and then it would randomly connect and disconnect from the computer, and eventually wouldn't appear in disk utility at all. I searched the internet for a solution but all I could find were forums saying that WD is garbage and the best solution is to get a new enclosure and put the drive from the Mybook in it. So that's what I did, and I still can't get the drive to work. I can hear the drive spinning, the power light is on, the drive appears in System Profiler and sometimes appears in disk utility as "Generic External Media" but it doesn't work.

It is possible that the actual drive mechanism is damaged and not the electronics in the enclosure.
Sounds like junk to me. It is better to cut your losses and buy something known to work.

Trouble accessing files on external USB drive after 10.6.8 update

Upgraded to Mac 10.6.8 on my MacBook Pro (I'm not a techie, but the "About This Mac" thingy says 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 - I assume that means something to somebody). Since the upgrade, I've been having problems accessing data on an external HD connected via USB - there were no issues before the upgrade, but now it's impossible to even navigate to a particular file or subfolder half the time, as the process freezes 95% of the time (every so often I am able to get through, for no obvious reason) - usually I just get what looks like an empty folder and a little spinning thing in the bottom right-hand corner. Sometimes when I do get to a file - say it's a ZIP file - I'll try to unZIP it and the process will hang; if I try to drag it to the desktop and unZIP it there, I can't get it to copy to the desktop, I just get the "copying files" box and a bar that never shows any progress, it just hangs at zero bytes out of whatever it might be.
Also having intermittent issues with another external USB drive, which is the one I use for Time Machine - about one in every five backup attempts is successful, the rest of the time I get a message saying the backup couldn't be performed.
I have two external FireWire drives as well, and I'm having no trouble with either of those - so I'm assuming the problem is USB-related (and 10.6.8 related, since none of this was happening before the upgrade).
So - I'm wondering if anybody else is having the same issues, and f there's a solution that a non-techie like me could handle that won't make blood come out of my ears.
Cheers!

Thanks baltwo - the PRAM tip was helpful. For some reason I still have trouble accessing a few files, I'm putting that down to them being somehow corrupted. Eric, thanks, but I tried using Disk Utility and the communication problems I was having with the drive meant that the repair couldn't be performed. I may try again now that that side of things seems to be running a little more smoothly. Anyway, thank you both!

How can i create a Trash for external USB Drives ?

Hello,
how can i create a Trash for external USB Drives or my TimeCapsule ?
Thanks.

You do not need to create trash cans for individual drives. The trash can on the desktop holds deleted files from all mounted drives.
TimeCapsule manages its own space. If it fills up it will delete older backps to make space for newer ones.

Can't access external USB Drive

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