External hard drive isn't reading on macbook or iMac?

I have tried both a macbook pro and an iMac and my hard drive will not even read. It is a hitachi hard drive. I went into disk utility and it shows my hard drive there, so I verified the disk and it said that it was okay. even tried to repair it and nothing happened, It said that my hard drive was fine.
I just can't lose the things that are on it, because I haven't backed them up in a while.
Thanks!

Is the drive mounted? Does Disk Utility show it as mounted? Can you mount it from Disk Utility?
Are you sure you have Finder set to show the drive on the Desktop (Finder->Preferences->General; Show these items on the Desktop)
Does it show up in the Finder sidebar assuming you have Finder->Preferences->Side Bar set to show external drives?

Similar Messages

Setting up an external hard drive to back up my MacBook Pro?

I am currently using a 320GB Western Digital external hard drive to back up my MacBook Pro using Time Machine, soon however I am going to be putting Windows 7 onto my machine so I am trying to figure out how I am going to back up the Mac OS X and the Windows partition at the same time using this hard drive. I am thinking about completetly erasing the drive and putting 2 partitions on it in 2 different formats (one for Mac OS X and one for Windows). I am also thinking of using Carbon Copy Cloner instead of Time Machine because it creates bootable backups. However, now that I am thinking about using Carbon Copy Cloner I am wondering if FAT32 will work for both partitions? (I have been using Mac OS X extended (journaled) only because it works with Time machine). I need help though because I would not know how to go about completely erasing/resetting the drive etc.. then partitioning it and formatting it. I am also wondering if there is a windows equivalent of CCC or Super Duper to back up the Windows partition. Thanks for your help in advance.

I'm inferring from the way you wrote about using Windows that you plan on using it through Boot Camp. Have you considered using VMware Fusion (or Parallels) instead? Then Time Machine would back up the virtual machine along with everything else. You also have the advantage that you can use both Mac OS and Windows at the same time - you don't have to choose one or the other. There are two disadvantages. First, since both Mac OS and Windows are running simultaneously, you need more memory. I'd recommend no less than 8 GB if you run any serious software on either OS. You can get away with 4 GB, but at times the system will be really slow. Second, the virtual machine images are BIG - mine typically run over 20 GB - so you'll probably want a bigger backup drive if you go this way.

I have macbook pro 13" I want to know how to copy files from my mac to the external Toshiba Hard Drive. I can't even delete files from my external hard drive. please help me my macbook HD is almost full and I have to copy my images to the Toshiba HD

I have macbook pro 13" I want to know how to copy files from my mac to the external Toshiba Hard Drive. I can't even delete files from my external hard drive. please help me my macbook HD is almost full and I have to copy my images to the Toshiba HD

To delete files from your external HDD, attach it to your MBP and drag the unwanted files to trash and then empty trash.
Then you select the files that you want to transfer by 'drag and drop' to the external HDD and trash the files on your MBP.
Ciao.

How do you separate corrupt files from good files on a external hard drive importing them to my macbook pro

how do you separate corrupt files from good files on a external hard drive importing them to your macbook pro

You open them one at a time into thier respective programs and see if they are good or not and then send the bad ones to the Trash and the good ones to the appropriate folder.

External hard drive suddenly become read only

For those who have been using an external hard drive on OS X (using NTFS file system) without any problem and suddenly one day the system has started mounting it as a read only file system, this is because the file system right now has some inconsistences.
As it happened last night to me i started googling for a quick solution to solve the problem. But i didnt find anything out there. At least at first glance. So then i checked the system logs of the system in order to get some sort of specific information about why that was happening (in OS you have an application that makes so easy to have a look through the system logs and its in /applications/utilities/console.app). In my case, and i repeat, IN MY CASE, the problem was the following:
21/07/11 18:59:02 kernel NTFS-fs warning (device /dev/disk1s1, pid 2140): ntfs_system_inodes_get(): $MFTMirr does not match $MFT. Will not be able to remount read-write. Run ntfsfix and/or chkdsk.
So afterwards once known the problem, was as easy as to mount the external HD in windows and execute the command chkdsk /f (google about the usage of the tool if dont know how it works).
Alternatively, you have the Linux option using the ntfsfix command, but you will need to install the program before that (if dont have it previously in your system) or otherwise you won't be able to use it (sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs)
Hope it helps.
Marc

I got an error message that my External Hard Drive was now 'read only'. Having scoured the various forums looking for clues as to why it had happened I found numerous suggestions, all of which seemed overly complicated and beyond my basic understanding (I'm old enough to remember when Macs 'just worked').
Anyway, among the suggestions on how to correct this I found what seemed like an overly simplified one - 'Don't switch on your external hard drive until after you've booted up'. Since I tend to leave mine on all the time, I immediately turned it off and back on again and ran Time Machine in hope rather than expectation. Would you believe it? It backed up as normal first time. Hope it works for anyone else having the same problem.

How do i transfer music from an external hard drive to itunes on my macbook pro?

how do i transfer music from an external hard drive to itunes on my macbook pro?

easy just open iTunes and Finder together and drag the songs into iTunes
George Karakadas, hope this helped u. if it helped u PLZ RATE MY AANSWER AS: "CORRECT ANSWRER" thnx

I have a FAT 32 External Hard Drive marked as Read Only that is unchangeable by an administrator or root user, how can I make it read/Write

Hello, All,
I have a FAT 32 External Hard Drive marked as Read Only that is unchangeable by an administrator or root user, how can I make it read/Write without reformatting it ?

Hi Kappy,
Just wondering if you had any advice for my situation . . .
My time machine backup was backing up to a drive that was "Mac OS X Enteded Journaled, Case Sensitive." I had no idea what this meant, or that it would even cause issues.
I took my computer to the Apple store yesterday, and they wiped it clean. When they tried to restore it from the Time Machine backup drive, it would not work. Their guess is that Time Machine cannot restore from a drive that is "case sensitive."
Any thoughts on how I can convert my time machine backup data from a "case sensitive" state, to a "non-case sensitive" state? I've tried to just drag and drop the files from the case sensitive formatted drive to a new drive that I have that is formatted non case sensitive, but I get the following error message:
"The volume has the wrong case sensitivity for a backup"
I just really want my data back - I thought TimeMachine was the way to go (and was supposed to work) but unfortunately it is not.
Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

I made a bootable disc on an external hard drive, with Yosemite on it. I am running Snow Leopard on my iMac. How can I open the Yosemite disc from the desktop on my iMac? Does the external hard drive need to be connected to my iMac by firewire to

I made a bootable disc on an external hard drive, with Yosemite on it. I am running Snow Leopard on my iMac. How can I open the Yosemite disc from the desktop on my iMac? Does the external hard drive need to be connected to my iMac by firewire to do that?

kahjot wrote:
Snow Leopard's Startup Disk pref can’t see Yosemite volumes. So the only way to switch from Snow Leopard to Yosemite is to do what Niel mentioned. Doesn't matter whether it's connected by USB or Firewire, although performance via FW would be faster.
Are you saying that Yos/10.10, as a volume located in a mounted external drive won't appear as an option in Snow Leopard's Startup Disc, in Sys Prefs? I've never heard this one before. AFAIK any mounted volume, regardless of OS, should appear there. I would think that, if it appears in the Boot Picker/Startup Manager it would also appear and could be booted to from Snow's Startup Disk. I can't test this myself, since I don't have Yos. Is what you are saying documented somewhere?

When my old PC died I had the tech guy place my iTunes library on an external hard drive. Just set up my new iMac

When my old PC died I had the tech guy place my iTunes library on an external hard drive. I just set up my iMac and I cannot get my library on the external hard drive to import to iTunes. I authorized my computer and had the "purchased" songs downloaded from iTunes directly, but I have 3,000+ songs from other sources that I cannot seem to get to. Help! What's the trick?!

maggiedoodle wrote:
When my old PC died I had the tech guy place my iTunes library on an external hard drive. I just set up my iMac and I cannot get my library on the external hard drive to import to iTunes.
Don't import anythiong.
Simply copy the entire /Music/iTunes/ folder from the external to /Music/ on the internal.
Launch iTunes.
That is all you need to do.

External hard drive documents not read on a MacBook Pro

Hi all,
I use my external hard drive to save a document from another PC computer last week when I plugged it back on my Mac the documents cannot be read on a Mac as it says they are not supports by apps software or search for application that will open those files.
I have all the documents which I copy from my previous Toshiba Laptop which was windows7 but is there way to clean the external drive on Mac without loosing all the document? or how do I format my external hard disk on MacBook Pro?
Jok2

You can copy these documents to the internal drive of your MacBook Pro and then, format the external drive. If you want to use the external drive on Macs and PCs, I recommend you to format your external drive on a PC to use exFAT, better than NTFS or FAT32. You can also use FAT32 but it isn't compatible with files bigger than 4 GB, and NTFS disks can't be written on Macs. If you want to use this external drive only with your Mac, you can use Disk Utility to format the external drive using "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". Read > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU1.html
Depending on the application you used to create the documents on the PC, you have to install an application that reads these documents. For example, if you created these documents with Office, you can use Office for Mac, iWork or LibreOffice. Each one has got its advantages and disadvantages

New macbook air recognizes my external hard drive, but cannot read it

I recently bought a new Macbook Air about 3 weeks ago and I'm trying to access files that I have on my external hard drive. The macbook recognizes that there is an external drive, but when I click on it, the finder window is empty and it shows that there are no files on the drive. When I plug it back into my old Macbook pro (purchased in 2007, running Lion 10.7.5 ) I can access all of my files just fine. Also, a little while ago, while the drive was connected to the new laptop it ejected itself and gave me the prompt saying that the disk had been ejected incorectly. I'm wondering if there is something wrong with the disk because I did have to run disk repair on it once since it bricked. Or is it not compatible with this new macbook? I don't really want to shell out more money to buy a new disk, are there any programs I can install or new USB cables I can try? the disk is a Seagate 500GB portable expansion drive.

Hi Beth!
1) You need to plug the phone in with your USB cable. If for some reason it doesn't sync automatically, try clicking on the name of your phone in your lefthand menu of iTunes, and it'll bring you to a homepage of sorts for your phone.
2) From there, you should be able to click on "sync" at the bottom right of the page. Or you may have to go to the individual parts of your phone (where it says "music," "apps," etc. at the top of the page), and enable those to sync on each individual page.
3) That should do it, but you can always go back to that homepage from step 1 and click "sync" or "apply" once more to be sure everything syncs over.
If you've done this already, can you explain where you're seeing a red circle on your iPhone? Usually those red circles let you delete something if you click on them. For instance, if you want to delete an app, you hold your finger down on it for a moment and then the red circle appears so you can click again to delete.
Hope this helps you!

My WD External Hard drive can be read and edited on my old macbook but not on my new

My WD 1TB hard rive can be read, edited and have files saved on it from my OLD Macbook Pro. I have recently got a NEW laptop and it can read the files on my hard drive but it cannot edit any of the files, change folders or move files in to different folders. The operating systems are the same on both laptops. I have tried this with other MacBooks and iMacs and there is the same issue.
My old laptop also very resently has stopped being able see my external hard drive at all now. I am not sure if my external hard drive is locked to my old laptop or if my new and other macs have a setting which stops them editing this external hard drive.
Thanks

Go to the WD site - they have both support questions and answers and a users group that can help you with questions.

My external hard drive is in Read Only mode...

My external hard drive, which I have used before, is in "Read Only Mode."
I have put files on this drive and taken files off of it before, so it isn't an NTFS issue.
I am still able to write with a different Mac.
FYI, this is a Late-2011 Macbook Air.

You are about to format your storage device. Be sure to copy and take the back up before formatting. Just select the physical disc you want to reformat in the tree on the left-hand side of Disk Utility. You can select a new file system format from the drop down below, and also name the new volume to be created. Showing the info of the newly formatted drive, you can see the disc is now set to read and write.

How to combine external hard drive iTunes account to my MacBook Pro's iTunes account?

Hey All,
I have external hard drive that contains my Macbook Air's iTunes account, and I want to combine it to my 'main' MacBook Pro's iTunes account.
I have spent endless hours organizing the music on my external hard drive (ie: genres, groupings, comments, etc) and am hoping to retain all of this precious information.
I am a newbie and obviously not very tech savy.
Any and all help is appreciated.
Ask me anything to assist in the process and I will get back to your promptly.
Cheers,
Danny

I just answered a question like this about an hour ago so I won't type it all in again. No, there isn't an easy way to merge libraries. You can copy the entire iTunes library to the internal drive and then try to export playlists and import them into the other library, Haven't done it myself but it may work. Fortunately most of the things you mention are contained inside the files themselves (unless you use WAV format) so even if you end up having to add the files to the main library as new files they will still have your data (but not ratings, or date added, or playlists).

External hard drive isn't visible, won't mount

Hi,
I have a WD MyBook external hard drive that is not working correctly with any mac. It randomly stopped showing up on the desktop or in the finder. I don't move it around at all, so I have no idea what the origin of the problem is. I have tried plugging it into a black Macbook, white Macbook and Macbook Pro with the same results. It shows up in both the System Profiler and Disk Utilities. In the System Profiler, I can get information on the drive. The only thing I see of note is that there isn't a mount point. In disk utilities the hard drive is gray. When I click on it to repair it, I can only repair or verify the disk. When I do that, it tells me that the drive "appears to be okay". I try to mount it and it tells me it cannot be mounted and to try running first aid. I also can't eject it.
I'm at a loss at this point. Is there something else I can try?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions and sorry for the long post!

Had the exact same problem yesterday and wanted to share how I solved it. It first happened a couple months ago. Would not mount on my Mac Pro, but it did show up when I connected it to my laptop. I solved it by just shutting off the Mac Pro, unplugging it even, and unplugging everything from the My Book drive. I let it sit for 3 hours. Started the Mac Pro up, then put FW cord into My Book, then into Mac Pro, then connected the power cord for the My Book. That worked. For some reason.
But I tried that again when My Book Pro Edition disappeared yesterday (could see it grayed out in Disk Utility, but it would not mount) and nothing would bring it back. After looking through the Western Digital site, I figured it had something to do with the partition being bad. I thought I'd have to buy Stellar Phoenix data recovery software, which might have recovered my data. But first I went out and bought Disk Warrior. Disk Warrior fixed it! I'm back up and running.
My theory on why My Book Pro Edition had problems this second time. To save my on my electric bill I write this during the recession), every night after I shut down the Mac Pro, I also turn off the power strip. Cutting the cost of "vampire" electricity, as they say. Now I see I wasn't shutting down the My Book properly... you need to follow the Safe Shutdown instructions -- pressing Power Button once. Although I also have the My Book Studio connected which hasn't been affected by my turning off the power strip as it seem to shut off by itself when the Mac Pro is shut down. I think improperly shutting down the My Book Pro every night is likely the reason Disk Warrior diagnosed the problem as a "severely damaged directory."

External hard drive isn't reading on macbook or iMac?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for