Windows external hard drive issue after being plugged into Mac Pro

MonsterMob

Hi,

I have a WD My Passport 1TB external hard drive with my music and personal stuff on it. The other day my sister plugged it into her mac pro. When I plugged it back into my windows operating computer I couldn't access the storage. The drive pops up in my computer but not the storage. I have gone into disk management and I can see the storage but it has no drive letter attached to it. When I right click on it to try and assign a drive letter I cannot click on that option as it is greyed out.

I think that the hard drive might be reformatted to FAT32 from NTFS? Not too sure about this. Anyway I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem or can help me get all files back? I'm guessing if I reformat this it will wipe all my files?

Thanks folks.

MM

yoyo

Or possibly Mac format HFS that Windows won't read, did she format it do you know? formatting will wipe everything, but she may have done this on her Mac

Nick

Zillah

If it has been formatted then you have already lost everything that was on it, and this isn't something that would happen trivially, especially on a Mac, you have to go into Disk Utility and do it from there. FAT32 would be no problem for Windows, but as yoyo says; HFS would be a problem. I suppose it is possible some app gave her the automatic option of formatting it and she didn't really understand what it meant.

If you just want the drive back in working order then try right clicking on it and choose Format, then tick Quick Format and choose "exFat" from the list (assuming Windows 7). ExFat is a modern standard compatible with both Windows and OSX, and even Windows XP if you install a particular update. If the format doesn't work or doesn't show up then you might have a hard ware fault, in which case try asking her if she dropped it. Ask in such a fashion that seems you already know.

I'm also assuming you've tried restarting all of the devices in question.

Torqay

Zillah wrote: »

If you just want the drive back in working order then try right clicking on it and choose Format, then tick Quick Format and choose "exFat" from the list (assuming Windows 7).

I believe, the OP wants his/her files back. This will make matters only worse.

While not impossible to recover the files under Windows (e.g. with Winhex), it will be a lot easier to use the sister's Mac and use some OS X data recovery software from there.

MonsterMob

Hi guys,

She just plugged it in to copy files from her old mac to her new mac pro. She tried to save some files down on it so I'm guessing it automatically formatted it in some way however she did say they never saved down when she tried to copy them across. In the computer management screen it doesn't identify what type of file system it is, it just says Healthy (Primary Partition). I'm not much of an expert to be honest!

MM

yoyo

MonsterMob wrote: »

Hi guys,

She just plugged it in to copy files from her old mac to her new mac pro. She tried to save some files down on it so I'm guessing it automatically formatted it in some way however she did say they never saved down when she tried to copy them across. In the computer management screen it doesn't identify what type of file system it is, it just says Healthy (Primary Partition). I'm not much of an expert to be honest!

MM

I'd say she formatted the drive. You could try TestDisk and try to recover the NTFS partition. The fact that she failed to copy the files on the Mac also suggests this

Nick

MonsterMob

yoyo wrote: »

I'd say she formatted the drive. You could try TestDisk and try to recover the NTFS partition. The fact that she failed to copy the files on the Mac also suggests this

Nick

Thanks YoYo, I'll give this a go this evening!

yoyo

MonsterMob wrote: »

Thanks YoYo, I'll give this a go this evening!

Failing that plug the machine back into her Mac (or any Mac for that matter) and run PhotoREC to recover the files

Nick