Help! restore my external hard drive

I just bought this new iMac and used my external hard drive (as a time capsule) to transfer the data from my MacBook. The problem is, now that the transfer is complete, I can no longer access all of the other stuff on my external drive! It's a 2TB and has a lot of necessary information, besides my computer backups.
Once I go to FINDER...it shows "Remote Disc" but it's empty. At one point, there was a drop-down box to access my old MacBook files, but that isn't there at the moment.
Any suggestions?!?
Thank you greatly

the "remote disc" in the sidebar wont be your ext. hd please refer to this;
http://discussions.apple.com/thread/3106427
have you successfully transferred your data? your description is a little unclear, and now you cannot access the other info on the drive. if this is correct can you see your ext. drive at all in the sidebar?

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Restoring an external hard drive with time machine

I'm having a problem restoring an external hard drive using time machine. I'm on a macbook Air Running 10.7.5.
The external hard drive where I store all my photos crashed a few days ago. Not a total disaster, because it's backed up, but I can't figure out how to restore the drive onto a new hard drive. When I go into time machine without the corrupted drive attached, it does not show up in the time machine browser as an option for restore. (The files are definitely there, though, because I can see them when I look at the time machine files in Finder. I'm afraid if I just transfer the files by dragging, though, I'll mess something up.) I tried using the migration assistant, but I'm having the same problem there.
Anyone know how to do this? I'm a little frantic to get my photos back.
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I am having a similar problem. I use a Lacie external hard drive connected to an Airport Time Capsule via USB to store my itunes library. Yesterday I disconnected the external drive from the ATC and connected it to my macbook pro via fire wire to transfer 40 gigabytes of media files from my laptop to the external drive directly rather than over wifi. When I reattached the external drive to the ATC the Lacie drive didn't show up even after rebooting everything. I then disconnected from the ATC and reconnected to the laptop and now I get an error message saying the Lacie disk is unrecognizable and needs to be reformated. The Lacie drive was being included in the time machine backups so the files should be available through time machine but I don't see anyway to access them because the Lacie disk icon doesn't appear in the time machine backups. Is there another way to browse the files?
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Help with using external hard drive to boot windows on PC

Hi,
I'm not sure if this is in the right place, so apologies in advance if not. I've looked around the internet for a good while now, and I haven't found anyone in my exact position.
My PC's hard drive (running Windows 7) recently died; long story short, I am attempting to reinstall windows. The only other computer I have is this MacBook Pro, on which I have an .iso file of Windows 7. So I want to use my external hard drive (WD 500GB "MyBook") as a boot device so that I can install Windows onto my new internal hard drive.
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I have also tried changing the file system of the external hard drive using the 'Erase' feature (NTFS-3G (using an addon), FAT32, exFAT, all of the others), but I notice that whenever I use Restore after doing this, the file system seems to return to Mac OS Extended, which might be why it isn't booting up on my PC. Is there any way I can succesfully partition the external hard drive in a format that will allow Windows 7 to boot (such as NTFS?), and is Disk Utility even the right program to do this?
If you want any more information from me, please let me know and I'll do my best to provide it - I'm not the most advanced mac user in the world, but I've spent days trying to fix this problem and nothing, no combination of anything, seems to work at all. So any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Here is a quick suggestion for you:
Download Virtual Box (free PC Emulator for Mac) and install Windows 7 on your Mac (don't worry about activating it yet, as you don't need to keep it more than a few hours). You can tell Virtual Box to use the ISO file as the DVD drive for your virtual Windows computer, so no need to burn a disk.
Search Google for creating a bootable USB installer for Windows 7. I found a link that gave good instructions on how to do this using DiskPart.
Follow the instructions to make the bootable USB stick for installing Windows 7 using your virtual machine you created above.
Use the USB stick to install Windows on your new PC.
Remove the virtual Windows machine from your Mac.
Remove Virtual Box from your Mac.
I found a set of instructions and built an installable USB stick last night that worked great for installing Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) onto my older ThinkPad I had sitting at home. The USB installer also installs in about half the time as a DVD install. The only reason I have you create the virtual Windows PC is that all of the instructions for makeing the Windows install USB stick are written assuming that you already have access to a running Windows PC. By doing this install, you have up to 3 days before you would need to activate it and you can build the installer USB stick and remove teh virtual computer long before that.

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Restoring from external hard drive

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This is a frustrating issue compounded by Apple’s penchant toward hopelessly poor documentation.
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If the Disk Utility lists it in gray, click on the Repair Disk button for it or attempt recovery of its contents.
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Restore from external hard drive backup

How do I restore from an external hard drive backup of my old system. How do you import into iTunes 8?

Hello,
Sorry to tap into this thread but it was the only one that made sense.
I have been trying to restore my kid's libraries from an external HD. I assumed I needed to be logged into their Windows profile to launch each of their own itunes applications. As I tried to launch with the Shift key held down, I got the appropriate request about choosing a library. But when I navigated to the HD and found their .itl file, it said it was locked or I had inadequate permissions and would not proceed.
I then logged in as myself (admin) & then dragged & dropped the files into their respective folders. When I went back to open itunes, the songlist was where it should be but nothing played when I tried them.
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Need Help with my External Hard Drive

Hey Guys, so i bought a 2TB WD Passport for Mac about 2 months ago...It worked great, but then i dropped it by accident. It was connected to my Mac at the time, so when it fell it disconnected from the cable and fell. Now when i connect it, the external hard drive powers on. I can feel it on like always, the little light turns on as well, its flickering as if it was in use. The thing is that it wont show up ANYWHERE on my mac. Any help?

LittleGuy16 wrote:
got dropped........It was connected to my Mac at the time
HEAD CRASH ,    your HD is extremely likely kaput
hard drive moving parts
Some of the common reasons for hard drives to fail:
Infant mortality (due to mfg. defect / build tolerances)
Bad parking   (head impact)
Sudden impact /head crash (hard drive jarred during operation, heads can bounce)
Electrical surge   (fries the controller board, possibly also causing heads to write the wrong data)
Bearing / Motor failure   (spindle bearings or motors wear during any and all use, eventually leading to HD failure)
Board failure   (controller board failure on bottom of HD)
Bad Sectors   (magnetic areas of the platter may become faulty)

Disk utility won't restore to external hard drive.

I recently installed Leopard on my Imac G5. I tried to "restore" the HD to a USB external hard drive. It said it would take 15 hours and when I came back - the time machine window was up and had a failure message as did the disk utility for the restore. Does the time machine need to be turned off to successfully restore the HD to an external hard drive?

Also worth noting that, if your drive has a FireWire interface, use that instead of USB. While the theoretical max speed of USB2 is faster than FireWire 400, in real-world conditions FW will blow the socks off USB. And if you're purchasing an external drive, it repays on the long run to pay a little more to purchase one with FW. And, of course, if FW400 is faster, FW800 is out of sight.

Help with unreadable external hard drive

I am having problems with an external hard drive and found your Email in yahoo answers.
I have a 'MB' external hard drive with a Mac OS X 4 11. A few days ago I turned off the Mac at the back button, after the screen went dark, I unplugged the HD only to find the Mac came on again. The Mac must have been in sleep mode? Since this time the Mac will not recognise the HD.
I tried another USB, making sure the preferences under finder is checked for all items and tried data recovery, PRAM reset, Disc Utility, which did see the drive (in gray) and it gave me this message; Error; underlying task reported failure on exit / 1 non HFS volume checked / 1 volume could not be repaired because of an error / unable to read FAT (input/output error).
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that was my backup!
If you truly mean a backup then that means you still have the original files on your internal drive, or wherever. You just make another backup. If you mean it was an archive/overflow drive then that's not a backup (and you should start thinking about buying another HD to save both the files on your internal and external since either of those could fail without warning).
So are you suggesting I go to a place/individual that does PC data retrieval? And does this mean I buy another external HD?
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There are supposedly Mac based recovery tools that can also recover FAT, but those would likely need a second drive and the results might not be pretty (files, everywhere, maybe without original file names).
I'd find a buddy with a PC and see if they have something on there that can do it for a cup of coffee.

HELP with using external hard drive

Can anyone please help? I have been using Windows based PCs for a majority of my life. I recently purchased a Macbook. I have thousands of songs saved on a Maxtor external hard drive. I recently connected the HD to my Macbook and was able to successfully copy over all of the photos I have saved and only few of the audio files but not all. I checked the audio files are saved in itunes format. Why can I not copy all of my music over? Please help! When I connect HD to PC I see the missing files that cannot been seen when I connect my HD to my Macbook. Bizare, don't you think?

Any chance that the files not showing up on the Mac have file names starting with a period (.)?
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So, the question is do you need the data that is on the external HD? If not, it's simple. Just navigate to the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder and launch Disk Utility. Plug in your external HD, and you will see it show up on the left pane inside of Disk Utility. Simply select your HD in the left pane. Then on the right side of the window select the Erase tab. I suggest formatting as Mac OS Extended Journaled and then give it a name. Click the Erase button and your old PC formatted drive will be formatted for the Mac and you are good to go. NOW, If you do need the data on the external HD I suggest burning that data onto a CD or DVD from your PC. Then you can copy those files over to the Mac via the CD or DVD and then you will have no worries about erasing the drive and formatting it for a Mac. Good luck.

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@simon backhouse
Your problem is a little different. I am guessing that your external drive was formatted using HFS+ (the standard Mac file system). Windows can not recognize this, although it detects that something is attached to your computer.
I would also guess that when you are in XP, you can not see your Mac OS X partition (the one on your internal drive).
To solve this issue, the only remedy I know is something called MacDrive. Once you install MacDrive in XP, you should be able to see all your HFS+ (i.e. Mac OS X) partitions and external drives. Furthermore, you will be able to save files to them.
Here is the link for the trial version of MacDrive: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/freetrial.asp

Help! restore my external hard drive

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