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TICKET ARCHIVE -> External Hard Drive Not Being Recognized

romay - Jun 27, 2005 - 5:14 pm

Hi,

I purchased a Seagate External USB harddrive for my MAC (running OS X). It worked great initially and I copied about 10 gig of data onto it to free up space on my hard drive. It worked for about a week, then I had a file I needed to get, I booted up and it won't recognize the drive -- I keep getting the error message that I need to initialize the drive. I've unplugged everything, rebooted, plugged everything back in, about 100 times with no luck.

I can see the drive with Disk Utility but it doesn't give me the option for First aid or repair -- it shows up as lightly grayed. I've tried Norton utilities, Disk Warrior with no avail.

My brother hooked it up to his machine and it saw the data but was going to take an hour to copy the files, so he unhooked everything and connected it to his faster machine. But then it wouldn't show up on that machine or the machine he could initially see it from.

Please help! I only have 4 or 5 more days to return the drive to the store, in order to get a refund, but I need to get the data off first.

Thanks so much!

DeltaMac - Jun 27, 2005 - 5:43 pm

Hook it up to your brother's computer that 'will take an hour to copy' That one sounds like your best bet. Use the technique that works...

You could also go through Seagate for a direct replacement.

-Dale

romay - Jun 27, 2005 - 9:15 pm

Hi again,

As I mentioned in the first email, the first time the drive was connected to my brother's drive, it could read it, but after he unhooked it and connected it to another machine, it wouldn't read on either machine. I wish it was that simple. Do you have any other suggestions. Are there system files I can delete and then restart the computer, to hopefully have my computer think it's the first time seeing this drive?

Thanks

DeltaMac - Jun 27, 2005 - 9:53 pm

you said you tried Diskwarrior - Did that see the drive, or were there errors when you tried to repair it? If DiskWarrior could not see it, or if you can't wait long enough to repair it, then the drive is simply bad
Just my 2 cents - A FireWire external drive would be a better choice for reliable use.

- Dale

romay - Jun 27, 2005 - 10:29 pm

Disk Warrior could see the drive -- same as disk utility, but it doesn't give any options to recover data. Any ideas?

DeltaMac - Jun 28, 2005 - 6:46 am

What happens in Diskwarrior when you choose to rebuild?

- Dale

romay - Jun 28, 2005 - 12:59 pm

I don't know. My brother just said it wouldn't work.