Problem when mounting my external hard disc

When I mounted my Western Digital Elements external hard disc to my iMac, a window appeared stating Mac OS could not fix this external hard disc, please reformat it. But I can still access to the content of the HD. Is my HD corrupted? BTW I got this HD for just about a month. Thanks for your help. _Julian

If you right click on the drive in the Finder, what is the Format of the drive?
Further down under Sharing & Permissions what does it say the Privilege is for (Me)?

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When mounting an external hard drive, I cannot access the folders - permissions?

I'm trying to mount the volume of an external hard drive on my desktop. I see the drive but the contents are not available to me. The drive works fine on another Mac -- how do I resolve this? thanks in advance!

If you right click on the drive in the Finder, what is the Format of the drive?
Further down under Sharing & Permissions what does it say the Privilege is for (Me)?

I use Time Machine with an external hard disc which has worked perfectly for some years. Recently Time Machine has aborted backups if the screen saver starts when back-up is in progress. I use a Maxtor OneTouch4 back-up system. Any ideas?

I use Time Machine with an external hard disc which has worked perfectly for some years. Recently Time Machine has aborted backups if the screen saver starts when back-up is in progress. I use a Maxtor OneTouch4 back-up system. Any ideas?
Has Apple recently up-dated my OS (Lion) such that every time the screen saver starts it disables Time Machine. I have to switch-off the computer and re-start in order to undertake a back-up. I have now switched of all screen savers.

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It’s unlikely to solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of this exercise is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party system modifications that load automatically at startup or login. Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards. Boot in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. The instructions provided by Apple are as follows:
Be sure your Mac is shut down.
Press the power button.
Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
Safe mode is much slower to boot and run than normal, and some things won’t work at all, including wireless networking on certain Macs.
The login screen appears even if you usually log in automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Test while in safe mode. Same problem(s)?
After testing, reboot as usual (i.e., not in safe mode.)

External Hard disc problem

I just bought a Samsung portable hard-disc (external) but I've run into some trouble.
I don't have a problem transferring files to the hard-disc from my old dell laptop (plug and play), and I can copy the files from the hard disc to my MBP. However, whenever I try to copy files from the MBP to the hard-disc, I get an error messag that goes: "xxx file may not be transferred because "New Volume" (title of hard-disc) cannot be modified.
I tried erasing the hard-disc using disc utility, and that allowed me to copy files from the MBP to the hard-disc. However, after doing so, my dell laptop couldn't detect the external hard-disc. I then formatted the hard-disc and gave it a disc-path on my dell, but when I did that, I got the aforementioned error message when I tried copying files over from my MBP to the external hard disc.
Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

The reason your Mac couldn't write to the disk initially is probably that your Dell formatted the disk as an NTFS volume (most Windows disk are formatted as NTFS these days). OS X can read an NFTS disk, but cannot write to it.
When you erased the disk with Disk Utility in OS X, it's likely that you reformatted the disk as an HFS+ volume (most OS X disks are formatted as HFS+ these days). Unfortunately, Windwos cannot read or write HFS+ without some third party software.
You have two solutions available.
First, you could use Disk Utility (or the Windows equivalent) to format the drive as a FAT32 partition. Both Windows and OS X can read and write to FAT32. However, FAT32 is a bit of an outdated standard, inferior to both NTFS and HFS+.
The other option is to keep the disk formatted as HFS+, but use third party software to work with the disk in Windows. Google "Macdrive" and you will find some nice software for this. The downside here is that you have to buy a third-party program. However, HFS+ is far superior to FAT32, and at least you can try out Macdrive for free before deciding to pay up and go this route in the long run.

User account on external hard disc frequently gets corrupted - reasons?

Dear all,
I have recently written a question regarding a problem with my user account; in this question I have described that I have my data for my user account on an external hard disc (USB2 hard disc), and that all data in this account seemed to be deleted one day (in fact, it was simply set to a wrong path, see below); user V.K. has helped me out of the problem - the problem could be solved by renaming the external hard disc and setting the path to my user data folder in the "user account" settings to my old folder on the renamed disc; You can find our discussions here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1513799&tstart=0 By the way, I use OS X 10.5 (newest version).
Now, several months later I find myself in the situation that the problem returns frequently, although I do not yet see regularities or the reason; each time the described renaming-procedure helps, but anyway it is annoying, and some programs who have data on my user account folder (such as Linotype FontExplorer X - latest version!) even fail to notice the change and have to be very reset with lot of effort.
Now, as I can not imagine that I am the only one who uses a user account on an external drive, I start wondering what am I doing wrong. Did anybody else ever experience problems like these? Does it also occur when the user account is stored in a network (on a server) - which must be a very common workplace setup? Is there anything known about the reasons?
I do not understand what causes this problem; and also, the problem seems to be very intricate - I do not know enough about the internals of Mac OS X, but (if You look into my old post cited above), if You simply try to reset the user path in the user account settings to the folder on the NOT renamed disc, the account stops to work completely, and the user cannot log into it at all; somehow, there seem to be different "stages" of corruption of the account on the external drive - I think that this may help somebody with detailled knowledge to understand the problem, but I am out of the game here... also, all the old names of the external drive keep to be mounted in the "Volumes"-folder on Macintosh HD - although they don't exist anymore.
I have formatted the external drive to "Mac OS Extended"; is this okay - or should it better be formatted to "Journaled"? The drive is a 500 GB external drive from LaCie - I think it should be okay (I have two of them - one for TimeMachine - the drives themselves work reliably, it appears).
Is there anybody who can help - or anybody with a similar setup and who could tell me whether or not he ever experienced a similar problem, and what he did against it (if necessary)? Thanks in advance!!!
With kind regards and greetings from Berlin,
Björn

Aside from starting over, losing whatever you've done on the new machine, see Pondini's Transferring files from one User Account to another. If you haven't done much and can afford to lose that data, I suggest starting over, following the steps in Pondini's Setup New Mac guide. That should result in just one user account.

Disk Utility cannot verify External Hard Disc

Hi,
Trying to get Disk Utility to Verify and repair an external Hard Disc, which is seen but only as 'disk1s1' not it's proper name. On plugging in it asks if I want to initialise the disk - obviously No.
DU sees the HD in the side bar but it's grey'd out, I can't mount it, Verify is greyed out.
Running diskutil in Terminal (which I'm not confident in) brings back the following - disk0 is my OS, disk1 is an install disk of Disk Warrior and disk2 is the external one I'm trying to sort out, as you can see it's got an FDisk_partition_scheme, which I think is the problem.
(BTW Disk Warrior doesn't recognise the disks either, however as this is an Apple Forum, I've not asked for advice on that here, unless someone wants to chime in on that software!)
I'm running OS 10.9.5, and it happens on multiple external disks, running in USB caddies of different manufacture, I've tried different cables, ports, restarts etc.
MBP 2.5GHz, i7, 16Gb, 500Gb SSD HD
Any advice would be most welcome as how get correct this
localhost:~ anthonyupton$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.4 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            DW                     *67.6 MB    disk1
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *3.0 TB     disk2
   1:                       0xEE                         375.1 GB   disk2s1
localhost:~ anthonyupton$ sudo gpt recover /dev/disk2
Password:
gpt recover: /dev/disk2: no primary or secondary GPT headers, can't recover
localhost:~ anthonyupton$ diskutil repairDisk /dev/disk2
Unable to repair this whole disk: A GUID Partition Table (GPT) partitioning scheme is required (-69773)
localhost:~ anthonyupton$

That is just a statement of optimization. It is not stating that there IS or IS NOT any errors on the disk. DiskWarrior does not actually have a separate "error detector" function. You basically let it run its disk directory data optimization routine on the volume. If it finds problems, it will attempt to fix them as it goes.
When it finishes, it will let you review its findings and results, and then you get to choose to apply the changes or not. Until you apply the changes, you are safe; if you do not apply the changes, the drive is not changed. If you apply the changes, DiskWarrior will replace the existing disk directory data with the optimized (and repaired if there was damage) version.
You should make backups of your valuable data before making repairs, in case something bad happens during your attempt to repair.
Be sure your copy of Disk Warrior is compatible with the Mac OS X release. Version 3.0.3 or later is compatible with Tiger.

Laptop no longer can mount my external hard drive

After updating to Mavericks, my laptop no longer can mount my external hard drive. What on earth is going on here and how can I fix this?

The drive is spinning and I was using it the night before I updated my macbook. It is viewable in disk utility but not in finder, and attempts to mount it are thwarted. The problem is literally coincident with updating the mavericks. When I click verify it didn't appear to have any problems but I will retry when I am back at home and report the findings.
It is a Toshiba 1GB external hard drive and has adequate power. Lights are on, etc.
I have not checked on another computer as do not have one available, but that will be my next step.

External hard disc not recognized

I have been using a WD external hard disc with Time Machine. Today I had it plugged into a USB powered hub when the house electrical power briefly went off then on, twice. A message appeared stating that device was removed incorrectly (or words to that effect). Now the HD does not appear on the desktop. It is recognized in "about this computer" as a USB device. It is not recognized in disc utility and thus can not be mounted.
All suggestions appreciated.

Answered my own question. Working now. Connected directly to computer USB and ignored it for a couple of hours and now it is visible on the desktop and appears to be working.

External Hard Disc won't show

My iMac hard disc is getting full so I bought an external hard disk. I changed my iTunes folder over to the external hard disc without any trouble and removed the old iTunes music folder as per directions. After that iTunes played fine, the next day when I turned on my iMac the iTunes music folder had reverted back to my iMac's hard disk, and the external hard disk no longer shows. I opened Disk Utility and the external disk shows there but when I try verify disk or repair disk i get "FIRST AID FAILED, Disk Utility stopped repairing “disk1s1” because the following error was encountered: The underlying task reported failure on exit."
Can anyone help, i have moved other data to the external drive also and its no lonfer in my iMac hard disk meaning if I have to send the external disk away for looking at I'll likely lose everything on it.

I think what you need to do is get a second external hard disk to attempt to recover data off that drive before you do anything else by using Subrosasoft Filesalvage to do the recovery.
External drives are best used as backup. If your itnernal hard drive is becoming too full, you need to know how to better manage your data, or get a larger internal hard drive. My FAQs* here should help you:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html
Good luck!
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.
Message was edited by: a brody

Time Capsule and external Hard Disc

Hi,
I have a problem with my Time Capsule (1 TB) and External Hard Disc (1 TB). The external HD is connected via USB. The idea is to have use the device as a shared HD in my network. First it worked perfect. After upgrading to Snow Leopard i have following problem.
Once the external HD is turned on my Time Capsule is not longer recognized. I can't connect to Time Capsule and make any backups. It is also no longer appearing in the Airport settings.
Can anybody help?
Thank you.

Emma1609 wrote:
Hi,
hi emma, and welcome to discussions
Once the external HD is turned on my Time Capsule is not longer recognized. I can't connect to Time Capsule and make any backups. It is also no longer appearing in the Airport settings.
you could try a power cycle on your devices. turn off modem, TC, and HD for, say, 10 minutes. turn the modem back on for 2 minutes, followed by the HD, followed by the TC.
then go airport utility > manual setup > disks. see if your HD is showing beneath the TC

Mount an external hard drive in single user mode

Do any know how to mount an external hard drive in single user mode:
I've issue the following command:
/sbin/mount -uw /
mkdir /Volumes/ex1
/sbin/mount_hfs /dev/disk2s3 /Volumes/ex1
(I've checked my external hard drive using df -k showing the device is disk2s3)
Result:
Permission denied

Hi leung wai,
   I wouldn't mind knowing the answer myself. I think the problem with doing it in the manner you attempted is that the device tree hasn't been created yet so the mount command is certainly not going to work. I assume that the answer is to start up enough of the system to have the device tree created. Unfortunately, I don't know where in the startup process that occurs. You could try the following command after making the boot volume writable:
/usr/libexec/registermach_bootstrapservers /etc/mach_init.d
Then check to see if the /dev virtual filesystem has been created. Of course it wouldn't surprise me if that didn't also mount your disks. If not, try the following:
/sbin/SystemStarter
It should have been created after that because at that point almost the whole system has started.
Gary
~~~~
   You've been telling me to relax all the way here, and
   now you're telling me just to be myself?
         -- The Return of the Secaucus Seven

How to copy my iphoto from one external hard disc to another?

Hi, I am trying to copy my iphoto library that is on my external hard disc to another empty external hard disc, but i keep getting this message:
You can’t copy “iPhoto Library” because it has the same name as another item on the destination volume, and that volume doesn’t distinguish between upper- and lowercase letters in filenames.
What am I doing wrong? all I want to do is to beck up my iphoto library into another external hard disc.
Thanks a lot!

If the destination EHD is empty try reformatting it and try copying again. I don't use RAW files but there's no reason I can think of why you'd get that message when trying to copy.
Here's another approach:
1 - download iPhoto Library Manager and use it to rebuild your library.
2 - set the location of the rebuilt library to be on the second EHD.
Maybe iPLM will get around that obstical and let the library get recereated on that EHD. See the Note 1 at the end of the following:
Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
Download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.
Click on the Add Library button,
navigate to your Home/Pictures folder and select your iPhoto Library folder.
Now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the Library ➙ Rebuild Library menu option
In the next window name the new library and select the location you want it to be placed.
Click on the Create button.
Note 1: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments. However, books, calendars, cards and slideshows will be lost.
Note 2: your current library will be left untouched for further attempts at a fix if so desired.

I am not able to open few files from my external hard disc in snow lepord

i am not able to open few files from my external hard disc in snow lepord

Need more information. Is there a message when you try to open them?

I am unable to transfer my pictures from iphoto after editing back to my external hard disc. How do I do it. Previously I used Windows and this is the first time I am using a Macbook. Need help and tutorials.. Where can I find em..

Hi there, I am new to Apple Iphoto. I am having lots of problems in transferring my edited photos back to my external Hard disc after editing. How am I able to do it. will it be able to open in Windows OS... Previously I was using Windows and now i m new in using the Apple OS.. Need guidance.. Would really appreciate if any1 of u guys could help me through. are there any other applications that I could use to edit pictures.

Best if you try and explain what you are trying to acheive.
Iphoto is a different paradigm than you're used to. I don't understand why you are trying to transfer your edited photos back to an external disk.
There are tutorials here
http://www.apple.com/findouthow/photos/
Regards
TD

Mac book air not reading files on external hard disc.

Whenever I connect my external hard disc ( Transcend 1 TB, Ms DOS) to my macbook air (OS X 10.9.3, 1.3 GHz intel core i5, 4GB 1600 MHz) its icon appears on the desktop but I can not open the files saved on it. When I try to open the music files lets say, this message appears: "You can’t open the application because Microsoft Windows applications are not supported on OS X." Also, it worked properly a while ago. What shall I do?

What file extension(s) do these music files have at the end of their names?

Problem when mounting my external hard disc

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