Cant find external hard drive

Have saved photos and docs from old PC to external hard drive.
Have plugged into mac and it cant find it. I have all the appropriate boxes checked in the finder options.
Any ideas/suggestions appreciated.
Please give basic and easy steps.. im a new mac user.. OS X 10.8.2 thanks in advance

if i change the format will i lose all data on the DH.
I need to be able to access the files on the mac
Is it possible to have an external HD to be used on a mac and pc interchanging often ??

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Migration Assistant cant find external hard drive Best Buy backed up for me when laptop crashed.

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hello im new to imac so plz help me out here my imac specs:
model: MA199LL
intel based 1.83 core duo
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You can boot from the DiskWarrior CD - http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/details6.html
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Message was edited by: deviztate

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I have a Mac Mini (late 2009) and I have an iomega 1TB external hard drive connected to my mini via firewire and usb (usb allows me to use the usb ports on the external 1TB drive to daisy chain other devices). Since I installed Lion, my Time Machine and this 1TB drive (and its partitions) is finicky. Sometimes it is mounted and sometimes it is not. This issue has only surfaced post Snow Leopard and in the Lion era. I am not the first to say this but the whole reason I went Mac was b/c of Vista. I am beginning to think that Lion is the new Vista. Sorry for the latter, just venting... b/c this ain't the first issue with Lion.

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When I go to Migration Assistant on the MacBook Pro and choose back up from Time Machine or other disk, Migration Assistant recognizes the external hard drive, but when I click through, it shows my user profile and says it has 0.0 kb in it. Also says 0.0 kb for Apps and Documents / Files.
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macalltheway:
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Formatting, Partitioning Erasing an External HDD
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Message was edited by: cvw2

I'm having a similar...but slightly different problem.
My external drives (both firewire and usb connected) are showing up just fine in Finder...and I'm able to do all the normal things that I can do on them (moving things around, adding things, copying things, re-naming folders, etc..etc..etc).
BUT, what Finder has indeed stopped doing, is it has stopped showing search results for anything that is located IN these external drives.
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Quite baffling.
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Thank you!!!
cheers.

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PC formatted iPod (FAT32) can be read by a Mac computer but not the other way round.
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Start by Repairing the sparse bundle that contains your backups, via #A5 of the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of the +Time Machine+ forum.
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Mac can't find external hard drive

Hi,
I've had an external hard drive for my mac now for over a year. It's been working wonderfully, however, recently the hard drive can no longer be recognized by my mac. It doesn't come up in the Disky Utility and it doesn't come up in System Profiler. Naturally, there's a lot of stuff on there I want to keep. How can I get this thing mounted again?

Our company's system admin made me aware of Scannerz, which is a test tool. Their web site in the how to and downloads section has a lot of info on that type of stuff. The link is:
http://scsc-online.com
I saw that happen once when the drive became corrupt and Disk Utility wouldn't see the drive. There's a command line way to use Disk Utility and the drive doesn't show up with a name but with a disk id like /dev/disk023s23 (something like that...that's an example).
Also, check your drive cable. It might have gone bad.

Cant see external Hard Drive connected to TC

Hey Guys
Love my TC but still cant get it to work as I want. I will list my challenges seperatley.
The first one is I have a hard drive connected by USB but I cant see it in Finder? I can see everything on my TC but not the connected HD.
Thanks in Advance
AC
(Its the latest TC with latest software)

What Bob suggested should work.
You can also plug the USB drive into a Mac.. Mac OS can read NTFS but not write to it. You could then copy the files to the TC. My experience is Mac reads NTFS very slowly..
You do want to get the PC working I think, by ethernet to the TC and copy the files.
If this is just temporary that is fine.. using the TC for a data store and mixing with Time Machine is not such a great idea.
IMHO USB drives are cheap.. go and buy a new one. So you can copy the files direct from one disk plugged into your computer to the drive correctly connected to the TC or to the Mac.. Keep the old USB as a backup or format it and use it for something else.

Cant format external hard drive

I got this 160 GB hard drive to use for time capsule. Started up alright but after 5 GB backup got an error message and stopped. I tried to format and repair it in disk utilety but wouldnt work. I also tried to delete the files in finder but wouldnt work. In use. Does anyone have any idea whats going on with my external harddrive? Could it be damaged?

Yes you need to format and erase the drive using Disk Utility>Erase>Security Option>Zero All Data.
This will write 0's to the complete drive and map off the bad sector that is causing it to hang.
I really don't advise TimeCapsule or TimeMachine as a solo backup measure, anything is better than nothing of course, but in most cases the more involved and complicated it is, the more it tries to hold your hand or "assists" and thus becomes less flexible and dependant upon other things working (especially wireless), the more tendency of it to fail when you need it the most.
Most times a very simple direct clone of your boot drive onto another drive is all one needs, and since you have a iMac, that means you can leave the external drive connected all the time and software makes a scheduled clone every few days or so. Another benefit of a external drive clone (that TimeMachine and Capsule don't offer) is that it's "hold the option key" bootable, so in case your iMac's hard drive dies you can simply boot off the clone and keep using the machine.
So instead of having to drag your iMac into Apple, waiting a week or so and paying a fortune for a out of warranty drive replacement (which makes you consider getting a whole new computer instead) for $70-$100 plus free Carbon Copy Cloner, your doubly covered against software and hard drive failure.
Another thing, we used to be able to replace hard drives in iMac's on our own, but now Apple has placed proprietary software on iMac's drives that the machine won't function without it. You can't get this software, thus you can't replace the drive yourself.
Read about the different backup methods, restore/rescue options and performance advice in my post here.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201

Can't find external hard drive

Hello, I just bought a 60GB External 2.5" SATA Laptop Hard Drive for my new macbook, and I can't locate it when I plug it in. The green light lights up fine, but it doesn't appear on my disk utility page. Not sure how else to look for it.
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Hi, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Is it self powered, or does it also have a Power Supply?
FW or USB?

Cant find external hard drive

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