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.

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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.

Suddenly won't recognize external hard drive

Hi,
Yesterday, while my 3- or 4-year-old external hard drive was plugged into my MacBook Pro but not being actively used by me, I heard a faint "click" come from the external drive. Since I was done with it, I tried to drag the icon to the trash to eject it, but the icon turned a faded grey color, and a message popped up saying something like "The disk was not ejected properly, etc."
Now when I turn the external drive on, I can hear it starting up and the lights come on as always...but the icon won't show up on my desktop.
I can find the external drive in Disk Utility, but that's it. I clicked "Repair Disk" and "Verify Disk", but the icon still won't show up on the desktop.
My buddy tried connecting it to his PC laptop, and the same thing happened -- his computer knew it was there, but he couldn't open it and actually USE it.
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-I opened up the enclosure, which is made by a brand name called "Anvesome" or something (The icon itself is called Afterthemac, and the sticker inside the case says Western Digital, and it was manufactured in 2005. The hard drive came in a box with less-than-perfect English grammar, if that means anything.
I had been using this external drive on my eMac for a few years, and about 7 months on my MacBook Pro with no problems. If anyone knows what's wrong with it, or how I can recover the data, that'd be great!
Thanks!
-Andrew

The enclosure should come with its own set of instructions. One end of the hard drive will have some pins, and it will just plug into a cable or connector. I personally like OWC enclosures, and here is a link for installation instructions for their external enclosures:
http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/basictrob.cfm
Not knowing exactly which drive you have, I can't make a specific recommendation. I'm guessing that it may be a 3.5 inch SATA drive if it was bought to be used with an eMac, but you would probably have to find out for sure from the serial number. However, if you look at a set of installation instructions, you should be able to gain some insight as to how to remove the drive from its current enclosure.
You may also want to check with Western Digital, as they do have a link to some data recovery services should you ultimately need them:
http://support.wdc.com/recovery/index.asp?lang=en&selregion=americas
However, professional data recovery can be very expensive, and if you can place the drive in a different enclosure and use one of the links eww gave you, you may be able to recover your data for a fraction of the cost.
Go ahead and get your new 2 TB drive and get your stuff backed up. I don't think it would hurt to let the old drive sit until you figure out what you want to do with it, as long as you don't let it sit for years and years.
At this point, we don't really know if the drive has physical damage or not. If not, data recovery costs shouldn't be too bad. If the drive actually has failed, then expect to pay a lot.
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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.
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Data Rescue may recover your files. You will need a drive of the same size to copy over your files.
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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

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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.)
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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.
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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.

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?
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If Disk Utility on two different Macs don't recognize anything on the drive, it's in bad shape.
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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.

Sudden fail to read external hard drive

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