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)

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Need help with networking external hard drive

Hi,
I am working on a corporate network and I have a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition external hard drive attached to a Mac OSX 10.4. i have other Macs connecting through the network to this Mac and accessing the external hard drive and it works just fine for that.
What I need help with is the fact that I also have several PCs on the same network (all XP), that need to connect to the hard drive and access the files. I've been able to connect to the Mac using the XP by accessing the IP address. I also set the Mac up with password credentials so that I had to log in to the Mac to access the files. But when I try to access the Mac, it only shows the main computer drive as the only available share and no external drive.
Does anyone know how to access a Western Digital external drive on a Mac from a PC through a network?

For an external hard disk drive or other (different) system shared
storage devices to work, they probably should be formatted in a
format seen by both operating systems.
If the WD unit is not seen by Windows computers on your network,
the WD may have been formatted in HFS+ for the Macintosh. That
is OK unless you need a Windows computer to access the same.
The Macintosh can see and use a standard Windows disc format;
so the external drive may need to be reformatted away from HFS+
if that is really what is going on (and archive any data on the suspect
drive elsewhere, since it will be lost to reformatting overwrites)
and then both Mac OS X and Windows should see the files on there.
And Macs set up to run Windows may also see the non-Mac format;
without having to re-boot via BootCamp, if that option is in use.
As to the other question(s) I really have no idea at this point in time.
And since that may be the rub, hopefully someone will follow up here.
Good luck & happy computing!

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).
I am hoping I can still use this external HD or could there be bad news ahead? I have not yet tried this on another Mac. Please can anyone help or advise? Thank you.

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?
I don't know much about file recovery on PCs. If this was a Mac drive then there would be a good chance you could either use Disk Utility on your Mac already to repair it, or perhaps a utility such as Diskwarrior ($100) to do the same. That repair could be done pretty much in-place. It's only when a drive is really seriously damaged, in particularly physically, that you need a second HD. Again, this is if you could do this on a Mac.
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 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.
The problem I am having is that, well, nothing seems to be working. Every time I try to load the .iso onto my external hard drive and boot my PC with it, either a blank screen appears or it says "missing operating system".
I have made sure that the BIOS is running the external hard drive as its boot priority.
I have tried using Disk Utility to partition the external drive, then using 'Restore' to load the .iso onto the partition, to no avail.
I have tried simply dropping the extracted .iso files onto the hard drive, this doesn't work.
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.

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 (.)?
Patrick

Looking for help with an external hard drive....read on please...

I have all of my music on an external hard drive, and that's where my iTunes "points" to for all the songs in my library. Here is my question (and please be as literal as possible, even if you think it's obvious):
When I purchase new songs from iTunes Store, they don't go directly to the harddrive (at least I don't think so). So, what steps do I need to take to get any new songs from my iTunes library onto my external harddrive? Thanks in advance. I know it should be obvious, but I've been burned by countless "obvious" functions/actions in iTunes one too many times

RAIDing the two will destroy the data on the drive. I'm sure that's explained in the manual.

Need help finding correct external hard drive enclosure for a T61 hard drive

Hi, recently my lenovo T61's video card fizzled out right after the warranty expired. I have information on the laptop's hard drive that i need to get off of it. I have a hard drive enclosure for my old hp laptop's hard drive but the two drive have different connectors. I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction to find a lenovo T61 hard drive compatible external hard drive enclosure.
The hard drive is a 100 GB 7200 RPM drive
Model: HTS722010K9SA00
HDD: 7K200-100
LENOVO P/N: 42T1056
HITACHI P/N: 0A53257
MLC: DA2141

what model is your HP laptop? also how old is it?
Prior to SATA connector there is the PATA connector.
http://archmemory.mobi/index.asp?PageAction=Custom&ID=106&imz_s=4c80f54d8ae8704709fec3ff867052fe
have a look at this.
Regards,
Jin Li
May this year, be the year of 'DO'!
I am a volunteer, and not a paid staff of Lenovo or Microsoft

Need help with cloning my hard drive to an external

I need to clone my hard drive to an external drive so that it is bootable and able to be used still, but I also need to do a fresh system install on my macbook pro. I have alot of programs currently on my system that I don't want on the fresh install but I will still need to use them on the external if I boot off of it.
My questions are:
1. Is this possible to do
2. If so how do I do it.
Thanks in advance

So virtually 2 different systems being able to operate on the one machine?
yes and yes.
most of the prosumers here keep a pair or at least one clone of every machine they have, theyre priceless tools for recovery from HD crash, and priceless in testing and usefulness.
yes, people use a clone drive for many things including testing or 'sandboxing' new software on a clone rather than their computer.
its the best fastest way to getting back to 100% quickly after a HD crash, many many advantages.
HD clones
Advantages:
1. HD clones are the best, quickest way to get back to 100% full operation in mere seconds.
2. Once a HD clone is created, the creation software (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) is no longer needed whatsoever, and unlike TM, which requires complex software for its operational transference of data, a HD clone is its own bootable entity.
3. HD clones are unconnected and isolated from recent corruption.
4. HD clones allow a “portable copy” of your computer that you can likewise connect to another same Mac and have all your APPS and data at hand, which is extremely useful.
5. Rather than, as many users do, thinking of a HD clone as a “complimentary backup” to the use of TM, a HD clone is superior to TM both in ease of returning to 100% quickly, and its autonomous nature; while each has its place, TM can and does fill the gap in, say, a 2 week old clone. As an analogy, the HD clone itself is the brick wall of protection, whereas TM can be thought of as the mortar, which will fill any cracks in data on a week, 2-week, or 1-month old HD clone.
6. Best-idealized 2nd platform redundancy for data protection, and 1st level for system restore of your computers internal HD. (Time machine being 2nd level for system restore of the computer’s internal HD).
HD cloning software options:
1. SuperDuper HD cloning software APP (free)
2. Carbon Copy Cloner APP (will copy the recovery partition as well)
3. Disk utility HD bootable clone.

Need help setting up external hard drive for FCE project

Hi folks,
Basically I am looking at making a 20-30 minute video this summer of my motocross adventures and what not and have equipped myself with an iMac (2.93 GHZ Core2Duo 640GB 4GB) and of course, FCE. I have tried smaller projects before (ranging in length between 20 seconds to upwards of a few minutes) but have noticed an overall decline in computer speed which I am under the impression is being caused by the 10s of GBs of video project files and what not that seem to be scrawled away within my computer. Before I made any videos, my computer was sitting around 560 GBs of free space. Since making maybe 3-4 videos (50/50 iMovie and FCE) its down below 400GBs. I'm not sure whether it's the raw video files or the projects themselves that are so large, but it's slightly frustrating. Is there any sort of software (either third party or apple) that can look at your hard drive and tell you exactly where all the biggest files are? I'll post this question in the iMac forum as I realize this is for FCE, but I thought if anyone knew of one it would be extremely helpful.
Anyways, I have a SimpleDrive 320GB external HD that I plan to use as my external for making this project within FCE and would like some help in terms of how to set it up with FCE, what are the best settings etc. It is currently formatted with Windows, so I will also need help in setting it up for a Mac. I do have about 120GBs used on it already and was also wondering if I could keep this when re-formatting, but I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to that.
Sorry for the long-winded post; any information on this or something related would be fantastic. Thanks.

Yes, you can use your external HD with FCE ... provided it is formatted as +Mac OS Extended+ and is connected via FireWire.
You will need to back up any data that is on the drive that you want to keep. Before reformatting it. Formatting erases everything that is on the drive.
Use Disk Utility (located in your +Applications > Utilities+ folder) to format the drive.
After formatting the drive, go into +FCE > System Settings+ and change your FCE scratch disk location to the external drive.

Need help with Raid 1 hard-drive replacement

Hello All - I hope someone can help with this.
I have a Raid 1 set-up using two 1Tb external drives (1 Seagate and 1 Lacie) which has been working perfectly - until yesterday that is. I received an error message saying the Raid 1 Set was degraded. On checking I got an error message against the Lacie HDD 'Disk failure'. Following instructions i found on Apple Support i tried to replace the failed drive with a new 1Tb drive - but then got an error message saying that the new drive was too small - on checking the original Seagate Drive reads as 999.86 Gb with the new Drive reading 999.83 Gb. I presume this is to do with formatting of the 2 drives, although one would assume (perhaps naively that as both drives are 1Tb they would be the same size when formatted!!
In light of this I ran 'verify disk' on the Raid 1 Set and this was ok and I am now attempting to rebuild the failed Lacie drive - 10 hours still to go. However even if this works I would want to replace this disk as it is quite old now. The Raid 1 Set is backed up to Time Machine on a separate HDD.
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Thanks in Advance

For an external hard disk drive or other (different) system shared
storage devices to work, they probably should be formatted in a
format seen by both operating systems.
If the WD unit is not seen by Windows computers on your network,
the WD may have been formatted in HFS+ for the Macintosh. That
is OK unless you need a Windows computer to access the same.
The Macintosh can see and use a standard Windows disc format;
so the external drive may need to be reformatted away from HFS+
if that is really what is going on (and archive any data on the suspect
drive elsewhere, since it will be lost to reformatting overwrites)
and then both Mac OS X and Windows should see the files on there.
And Macs set up to run Windows may also see the non-Mac format;
without having to re-boot via BootCamp, if that option is in use.
As to the other question(s) I really have no idea at this point in time.
And since that may be the rub, hopefully someone will follow up here.
Good luck & happy computing!

Help with an external hard drive enclosure

I had a Power Mac G5 that had a motherboard which died. The hard drives were still good so I purchased the "EAGLE Consus D-Series ET-CSDU2J-BK JBOD 2Bay SATA to USB 2.0 External Enclosure". I have it on the setting which both of drives show up on the desktop individually. So far it works and everything is great but I would really like to make it so it combines both hard drives (two seagate 160GB of the same model) into one 320 hard drive. I have a macbook pro running OS X. Do i have to reformat and erase everything before I change it to spanning or can i just switch the jumper and have one hard drive image with all my data still on it? Thanks
Here is the online manual if it helps http://www.eagletechusa.com/Download/ET-CSDU2J-BK_UM.pdf

RAIDing the two will destroy the data on the drive. I'm sure that's explained in the manual.

Need help with HP dv5 Hard Drive.

I believe I need to replace my hard drive for my HP dv-5. What I need to know is can I put in any Sata 2.5HD or does it have to be the Toshiba HD that is currently installed? I understand there could be issues going with a Western Digital with drivers maybe....??? But from a cost prospective I'm think of going with a much larger capacity HD and maybe going from 5400RPM to 7200RPM. Currently I have 320GB and I'd love to move up to a 500GB or even a Terabyte.
The reason I believe my HD has crash is because when I start up my laptop it asks me to install the OS. I've been having issues with this laptop for some time now, it seems to loop at start up without ever loading. And now with this OS issue I feel it to be much easier to just purchase and replace the HD. I also have Windows Vista installed on this laptop which I feel is absolutely awful, I have Windows 7 and would love to be able to install this on my dv-5.
Additionally, I have attempted to load Windows 7 from USB flash drive onto this current dv-5 and it fails.
If anyone has any comments or suggestions, has anyone done this successfully...???
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.
Thanks,
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1TB drive will be too thick and will not fit in the drive bay, any size below that is OK, I suggest the Western Digital Scorpio Black Series 7200rpm drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007605%2050001306%20600003340&IsNodeI...
Test your memory
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Lockups-Freezes-Hangs/How-to-test-RAM-and-HDD-Hard-Drive/td-p/...

Need help with my mac hard drive?

I'm running MacDrive Standard to view my Mac-enabled hard drive on my pc laptop. Worked fine for a year now. Suddenly, Word documents start becoming inaccessible, saying there's something wrong with them, my movies and TV shows on the hard drive lag, as well as viewing photos on it. Today, I take a look at it and Windows says "The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable." This prompts MacDrive Disk Repair to ask to check the volume, which it does, only to tell me no errors were found. What do I do? I've got 300 gigs of information (on a 750 Western Digital My Passport hard drive). Any suggestions would be appreciated, because I'm desperate.

I used to use MacDrive from MediaFour. I think I used versions 7 & 8 mostly. I even had 5 or 6 licenses for it so I could use my HFS+ formatted drives on my many PCs. Before I stopped using my PCs I had switched to using the Paragon HFS+ driver for Windows as it did behave a little better under Windows 7 for me.
Now, on to the real issue, your dirve is reporting corruption, but when you run the MacDrive repair option is says there is nothing wrong. Have you tried connecting the drive to your Mac and letting MacOS run a valume check and repair on it? I would think that it is quite possible for MacDrive to not find all the problems that MacOS could find and fix.

Need help with installing new hard drive in Satellite Pro M10

Hi All,
My hard disk died in my Satellite Pro M10 so I decided to fit another.
It fits fine in the caddy but just doesnt want to slot into place correctly as something seems to be stopping it.
Does the M10 only accept a certain make/model?
Also does anyone know what the highest capacity the M10 will accept?
Many thanks.
Regards
J

As far as I know there should not be problem at all. Take old and new HDD and compare the connectors. I hope they are the same. I can just imagine the new HD is not placed properly in the HDD bracket. Be sure the new one is placed as old one after removing it from the notebook.
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Can you help me with my External Hard Drive?

Hey everyone,
I'm having a big problem with my external hard drives. Firstly, I'll give you all the information I think you might need-
* I'm running on Mac OSX 10.4.11.
* I have the most recent release 13" Macbook and it has plenty of memory left.
* Both my EHD's are made by LACIE. One is 250GB (18 months old) and the other 500GB (2 weeks old).
* Both work perfectly on every other computer I've tried - (2 Macs and 2 Windows).
* Both are formatted as FAT32 because I need to use them on Mac at home and Windows at work.
Now, the problem is every time I mount one of the EHDs on my laptop, they show up on the desktop but when double clicked (or Apple + O 'ed) they cause Finder to have a spaz, with the top white bar disappearing along with everything on my desktop (for about 2s).
What I have *tried so far*-
* Mounting and unmounting the EHDs.
* Turning on and off both EHDs.
* Plugging them in one at a time.
* Restarting the Macbook and plugging them in after it has fully loaded.
* Restarting the Macbook and plugging them in as it loads.
* Creating a new user account to open them in.
* Verifying both EHDs using Disk Utility - both claim to be working properly.
* That trick where you take out the battery and power source, hold down the On button for 5s, then hold Apple + P + R + Option while the Macbook turns back on.
None of these have worked so far. Please help!
Thank you so much in advance,
Joe

Have you tried opening them in a Finder window? Also, you might boot to your Install DVD and launch Disc Utility to verify and repair both permissions and your drive.
Sounds strange. I also have the Lacie 500G - partitioned, but with one being FAT 32 ...works fine for me.

Need Help with my External Hard Drive

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