Reading External Hard Drive

My brand new macbook pro 13" only sometimes reads my external hard drive. Any ideas what to try?

Mike,
I did move it like you have shown in the article. I can see all my music, it just has exclamation points before each song. When I try to play a song it says it can not find the file but ask if you would like to locate it. I can click the folders to get there and click on the song. The exclamation point is gone from that song and it will now play. But I would have to do that with every song.

Similar Messages

Can only read external hard drive, not write to

Hi
I have a Mac Book Pro and a 60GB external Hard Drive which I use to transfer files between my Win PC (!!) and my Mac. transferring files from PC to Mac is fine using the HDD but when I try to copy files from my Mac to the HDD it says I cannot write to the drive as it is read only. How do i make it writable as well as readable. Its formatted as Windows NT Filesystem if that helps.

mp_photo wrote:
Its formatted as Windows NT Filesystem if that helps.
Hi,
that is the culprit.
Mac OSX is only capable of reading from NTFS drives but can not write to them.
Possible solutions:
Reformat the external drive to FAT32 (using Disk Utility and 'MS-DOS'),
but be aware of the the size limit of 4GB for a single file
use MacFuse: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
Caution: reformatting the drive will delete all files on it, so make a backup before.
Regards
Stefan

New external hard drive froze while transferring info to new computer. Laptop does not read external hard drive. Went to Apple store and didn't work. Any suggestions?

Day 1. Went to Apple store because iMovie was not working. It kept shutting down. Prior to going to the store, I called Apple Support and deleted and reinstalled iMovie. Still did not work. Then I went to the Apple Store. After an hour it finally worked but when I got home, it didn't work AND my iPhoto application was missing. Tried to back up on external hard drive but it didnt work.
Day 2. Explained the situation again to Apple employee at Apple Store. I bought an external hard drive that employee recommended and picked out. I went home and backed up my computer on the external HD.
Day 3 (morning). Went back to Apple. Employee verified that my hard drive was backed up successfully. All my photos, music, and documents were successfully backed up. He was going to reinstall the operating system. He did that successfully. He showed me how to install the external HD info to the laptop. I went home and followed the directions. It was going to take about 2 hours. I kept monitoring the progress and everything looked good until....30 minutes remained. 30 minutes remained for a good 20 minutes. The ext hard drive stopped responding. I tried to canel but there were no buttons to push. I exited the program. I called apple support and they tried to walk me through it. My computer still was not recognizing that the exteranl HD was plugged in. I mad another trip to the Apple store and the emplyee confirmed that the extranal HD was not reading. He tried plugging it in to his computer and it still wasnt reading.
He did give me a data recovery number to call. I asked if Apple would cover the cost and he said no. I called then and was quoted $700-$2000 to recover the data.
Does anyone have any suggestions? When frustrates me more is that I followed every instruction and I did exactly what Apple told me to do. Now, ALL of my data is lost and Apple does not want to help.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do next? I need help. =*(

Hi rkaufmann--
Thanks for the response. I can say with confidence that that is not the issue. I have at least 8 of these same WD external portable drives that are powered through their USB 3.0 cables, and I have never had problems with any of them. Sometimes I connect them directly to my computer, and sometimes I use a powered hub. Either way they work fine. The drives with their own power source do not suit my needs.
My question is specifically whether anyone has seen an issue where sometimes they plug a drive in and it is not recognized but then it continues to work. In other words, the question I'm posing to other users is whether it sometimes happens that they connect a drive and it simply doesn't show up, but then they disconnect and reconnect and it goes on working fine as it should.

Sudden fail to read external hard drive

Hi, Im using both OSX and Windows 8.
And I usually store my stuffs such as movies, documents, and some utilities in my 1TB external hard drive. And Its format is "Mac OS Extended".
There was no problem until just now. After I got home and tried to load out some stuffs inside this external hard drive, finder says it could not find this external hard drive.
So I executed disk utility in order to repair disk ASAP before this situation getting worse. but this time, Disk Utility says "Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk... disk, and restore your backed-up files."
I was so confused about how this happened to this EHD, and don't know what to do with my 8years old documents and movies inside.
With all my wishes, I connected this EHD with my Windows8, somehow it can read this EHD and nothing problems. And still my stuffs alive.
Any suggestions to make my Mac to read this EHD again in order to solve this inconvenience?

Copy all the information onto an ExFAT formatted hard drive.
Your hard drive is likely dying.
ExFAT is likely more readable than HFS+ by both machines.
Alternatives here for formatting are:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3003
Data recovery options are here:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-1689
You should never let yourself only have one copy of critical data. Backup your data regardless.

Itunes not reading external hard drive correctly

I recently moved or at least attempted to move all my music from my old hard drive to an external hard drive.
My original plan was to have all my music on the external and have Itunes pathed to the external so whenever I have it plugged in, all my music would be in my library. Obviously it wasn't that easy, at least not in my case. Throughout the process I ended up losing a decent amount of my music which ***** but what can I do now. My question is, how do I properly have Itunes read my external hard drive and have it show my music? I have the path set to the folder in which my music is at but the issue seems to be that when I consolidated to transfer into the external, all the songs are in individual folders by artists. I'm lost and don't know what to do. If I drag the music folder to Itunes, the music stays on my library whenever the external is plugged in which is what I want. But, many songs are doubled for some reason.
Any help would be appreciated as this is becoming very frustrtating, thank you.

†ry the refresh script from here http://ottodestruct.com/blog/2005/10/20/itunes-javascripts/

USB Port not reading External Hard Drive

I have a WD External Hard Drive, it has worked well in the past, but all of a sudden it has stopped working when plugged into my USB port. I can't see it in my finder window at all so I can't access any of the files. BUT, it does show up when I open Disk Utility. Why has my Macbook stopped picking up the Hard Drive? Why does Disk Utility recognize it and not allow me to access the information? Please help.

I can click on it and choose to repair or verify it. But neither work to gain access to the information. The Hard Drive shows up in a light grey text somehow signifying that Disk Utility isn't able to tell you what is on the Drive, so it can't tell me how much is stored or how much space is still available for storage. With other Hard Drives, they show up in black text and are able to tell me this information. Is there something else I should try besides verify and repair?

ITunes reading external hard drive.

My iTunes library was on an external hard drive. I got a new external hard drive and transfered everything over to the new drive. iTunes sees the music but it asks me to locate each song before it will play. I have to go through folders to find the external hard drive, then the artist, then the song before it will play. Once it finds it, it stays in the folder and can be played. I have saved the new drive as my iTunes access location. There has got to be an easier way. I have over 4000 songs.

Mike,
I did move it like you have shown in the article. I can see all my music, it just has exclamation points before each song. When I try to play a song it says it can not find the file but ask if you would like to locate it. I can click the folders to get there and click on the song. The exclamation point is gone from that song and it will now play. But I would have to do that with every song.

Mac Mini won't read external hard drive

Hello, I have an external Toshiba hard drive and my Mac Mini will not read it. It was originally used on Windows. I plugged the hard drive into my Macbook and it worked as a read-only device. I can take stuff off of it but can not write stuff onto it on my Macbook. I want to use it so I can back up files on my Mac Mini, but it will not read it. I know I have to format it to make it writable with Mac, but I want to make it a read only device on my Mac Mini because I want to back up all the data already on it and my Mac Mini has 400gb of its hard drive available. How can I get my Mac Mini to read the Hard Drive?

If the drive has more than one interface (USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, eSATA), try one of the other interfaces.
Check that the data cable is securely inserted at both ends.
Try a different cable.
If you're connecting the drive through a hub, connect it directly to a built-in port on the Mac.
If you're connecting it directly, try a different port.
Disconnect all other devices on the bus, or as many as possible.
Test the drive with another Mac. Test another drive with this Mac.
If the drive is bus-powered, but has an AC adapter, connect the adapter.
Boot into Recovery and launch Disk Utility. Is the drive recognized?
Start up in Safe Mode and test.
Reset the System Management Controller
If the drive doesn't work under any of the above conditions, and if another drive does work with the same Mac, then the drive has failed. You may be able to salvage the mechanism by removing it from the enclosure and installing it in another one, or in a drive dock.

10.9.5 won't read external hard drives

I just updated my imac with OS X 10.9.5 and now I can not read two of my three external hard drives although I was able to read them just fine before
the update. The one I can read is dedicated as my Time Machine; it is a WD My Passport 1 tb drive that I don't believe is formatted in FAT32. The other
two hard drives are NTFS formatted but I installed Tuxera to enable translation (based on another Apple forum) and it has worked great. I can read all of these external hard drives on my macbook air and my other imac at home so it is not the hard drives or cables themselves. Its possible that Tuxera may not read on this new OS version; my recollection is that Western Digital places their own version of Tuxera on the hard drive to enable translation.
Under Finder I do not see the hard drives under "Devices". I do see the hard drive in Disk Utility but the name of the drive that appears beneath the drive description is grayed out. I tried Mounting the drive but it did not work. I tried "verify disk" but it does not work. Any suggestions that could help me read these drives once again would be most appreciated!
thanks much

This procedure is a diagnostic test. It makes no changes to your data.
Please triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
ls -@ORaen /S*/L*/E*/AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext | pbcopy
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear below what you entered.
The output of the command will be automatically copied to the Clipboard. If the command produced no output, the Clipboard will be empty. Paste into a reply to this message.
The Terminal window doesn't show the output. Please don't copy anything from there.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

IMac Won't Read External Hard Drive

I have an iomega external hard drive which has been working well as backup. My imac (10.7.2) inexplicably crashed and when I rebooted it longer would read the external hard drive. I get the message "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" with the options: initialize.... /ignore/eject. I think that when the imac crashed, the disk wasn't properly ejected. I tried using disk utlity to repair the disk but that failed. Any advice? I have a lot of videos and pictures on the external disk.....

It sounds like your drive directory has been corrupted.
DiskWarrior may be able to rebuild your drive directory. I have had success with DiskWarrior in similar circumstances.
If DiskWarrior fails to restore your drive, then, you are looking at data recovery.
Data Rescue may recover your files. You will need a drive of the same size to copy over your files.
If Data Rescue fails, then, your last resort is professional data recovery services.

10.9.3 won't read external hard drives

I recently installed 10.9.3 and now two of my portable external hard drives - one from Seagate and one from Toshiba - will not show up when I plug them in via USB. My MacBook Pro that isn't updated reads them just fine.

Disconnect both EHD's then reset the SMC and PRAM following the directions https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3603. These restarts may need 2-3 attemps before working.

How to read external hard-drive from all users

Hello everybody !
I have a Lacie Porshe Design external hard-drive for my Mac.
I have 2 user accounts which both are "admin".
Since yesterday, when I plug my external hard-drive, I cannot read the files on it unless I'm on the first "admin" account. I want to read the files from all the users account. There's a little red stop sign on the files and it tells me I have not the permission to view the files when I'm on the second user account.
Why does it work only with the first "admin" account and not the second one ? How to I disable this ?
It worked perfectly yesterday and I have no idea why.
Thank you very much guys !

I am sorry for the confusion.
The technician fresh-installed all the programs needed on a session they created called admin. On it there is all the programs but nothing else.
In case of trouble with the programs and licenses, the techicians asked for us to leave this ADMIN session untouched and to do our project and personnals things on our own new session.
So I got
ADMIN - only the programs installed by the technicians, admin status enable first
PERSONNAL - all my personnal files and the programs installed by the techicians, admin status enable later
When I read my Lacie Hard-Drive from the PERSONNAL account, I do not have the permission to read my old Time Machine backup files from my previous mac even thought the PERSONNAL account got the admin status enable. But when I read the Hard-Drive from the ADMIN account, I can read those files.
Hopefully this is clearer.
Thank you for your time !

How to read external hard drive photo's on iphoto

I have all our photo's (nearly 56GB's) stored on an external hard drive for fear that one day my iMac woudl crash. Everytime we'd load a photo, it would load to the external hard drive, and the 'old iMac' iPhoto would read it from the hard drive. That computer crashed. We're now using my wife's MacBook Air, but that only has a 64GB flash drive, so loading the photo's onto that will not work. How do I set up my wife's MacBook Air to read the photo's on the external hard drive?
I'm running OS 10.7.4

Have you got that disk backed up?
I have all our photo's (nearly 56GB's) stored on an external hard drive for fear that one day my iMac woudl crash.
Simply, that drive is far more likely to suffer damage than your Macs HD.

DiskWarrior Preview Not Reading External Hard Drive -- Can't back up files

So I recently fell upon the grey screen with the folder problem. After some research I got disk warrior and ran it on my computer (which I got in September 2006). After it was finished, DiskWarrior told me that the disk was malfunctioning and therefore could not replace the old directory with the new directory. What I take this to mean is that I need to get a new hard drive or a new computer altogether.
Per the recommendation that I back up my files, I tried inserting my USB eternal hard drive, however it is not showing up on the DiskWarrior Preview screen (the one where you would be able to transfer files). I restarted the computer and redid the whole process, and the external drive did show up on the list of disks that I had the option of repairing. I chose to rebuild my internal drive, of course, but came back to the Preview window where I could not get the external drive to appear. How do I back up my files???
I will be able to stop by an Apple store this weekend, so I'd like to know if there is anything else I could do to save my computer, more specifically how I can back up my files in the case that something terrible happens to my data.
Thanks
- Liam

Hi,
I was wondering if you ever resolved this issue as i am having exactly the same problem with my powerbook G4 17" With Leopard (i cant remember the exact version and now i have no way to check).
It recently would not boot up past the gray screen and after a while of the apple logo with the spinning bar it shut it self down again.
After going through all try to book from system disk) and getting pretty dismal results i have come to use disk warrior 4.1.
Now i managed to boot the machine from the disk and have run the rebuild option and after a couple of hours i was faced with the message that
"disk warrior has successfully rebuilt a new directory from the disk named macintosh HD" but then "THE NEW DIRECTORY CANNOT REPLACE THE ORIGINAL DIRECTORY BECAUSE OF A DISK MALFUNCTION"
This report then goes on to tell me that it is highly recommended that i back up all the data from the preview disk.
So this is where the problem lies, i can not get any external drive to in the preview window so that i can copy the information. The drives work just fine, have ample space but i just can not access them through preview window.
I did what was said above as well in restart the disk warrior process agian with the external drive already plugged in (with even an option to rebuild that) yet after rebuilding the internal harddrive again i can not see the external. The weird thing is i know that the machine recognises that it is there as i can save a pdf report to it yet when it comes to access through the preview window there is no such option.
Does anyone know what to do? Do i look for another programme or i could hook it up to another mac and perhaps it would recognise that as a disk to send to . I just need a viable option of getting my data from the internal drive to an external source so that i can re format the thing.
I can see it, i know its there yet i just cant figure out how to do it. Very frustrating.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Can't read external hard drive since security update

Hi,
I hope one of you guys can help me with my problem. I have an iMac running 10.6.2 and use an external 1GB hard drive (MyBook Studio I think it's called - connected via Firewire800) for my time machine backups and to store movies.. on two partitions. All used to work fine until I installed the latest security update a few days ago.
Since then I can't connect to the hard drive anymore. Whenever I boot my Mac I get the message that the disk I inserted can't be read and I get the options to initialise, ignore or eject. When I open disk utility it recognises the hard drive but states it is unformatted (which is not true).
I plugged the hard drive via USB into my Macbook - same message. I tried repairing the disk permissions on my iMac - no difference. I can't repair any permissions on the external drive as it is all greyed out. Also tried resetting the parameter RAM - no success.
Any suggestions how I could get back my data on the external drive?
Thanks for your help!

If Disk Utility on two different Macs don't recognize anything on the drive, it's in bad shape.
If you have +Disk Warrior+ (version 4.2 only) or another heavy-duty disk repair app, there's a small chance it might be able to find and repair the file system, but it's highly doubtful.
I hope you have backups of the movies. If you do, try to completely reformat the disk. Take the time to do a complete erase -- click the Erase tab, then +Security Options,+ then choose +Zero Out Data.+ That will take a long time. If it fails, the disk is toast. If it completes, the drive may be ok to use, but I'm not sure I'd trust my backups to it.
If you don't have backups of the movies, you need specialized +Data Recovery+ software, or a service that performs the function. It's not cheap, and there are no guarantees.
The app mentioned here most often is +Data Rescue 3,+ but I haven't used it myself, so can't recommend it over any of the others.
Some of these have a free "trial mode," that will tell you if there's anything to be recovered, and perhaps recover a single file. For more, you have to pay the $$.
You'll also need another drive to receive anything it can recover.
Look for apps or services under +Data Recovery+ via Google, VersionTracker.com, or MacUpdate.com.

Reading External Hard Drive

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for