IMac :: Unable To Recognize External Hard Drive / After Reformat
Jul 7, 2010
Yesterday I reformatted my Macintosh hard drive, partitioned it, installed Snow Leopard on one partition and Windows 7 on the other. I installed all the drivers for Windows 7 from the Snow Leopard disc.
When I plug in my 1TB Seagate external hardrive it's not showing up in Snow Leopard or Windows 7. Not even in Disk Utility. I tried plugging the external drive into my Windows laptop and a pop-up comes up saying "USB Device Not Recognised. One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognise it." I think that this may just be because it's formatted to Mac OSX?
The hardrive had all of my photos, videos and music on so I hope it's salvageable. I find it hard to believe that the hard drive malfunctioned at the same time I reinstalled the software onto the iMac.
I have 100gigs of music so I successfully transferred my iTunes media to an external hard drive, and identified this new location within iTunes/Preferences/Advanced/Location. Everything worked great until I had to shut down and start up.
Now, it no longer recognizes the media library. When I try to play a track in iTunes, iTunes says the original file could not be found. It prompts me to locate this one track, which I do, and that one track will play. All of the other tracks have the (!) sign next to them in my iTunes library.
I have double checked the settings in my iTunes preferences, everything appears to be configured as when I first made the successful transfer (identifying the external hard drive as the location).
I've made sure to restart once the external hard drive is connected.
I have one hard drive that is readable and writeable on my mac desktop but read only on my mac air. I am trying to transfer all files from a couple external hard drives onto a new larger back up drive so I do not want to lose any information by reformatting.Â
On my vista / xp machines, I have several external hard drives, Seagate, WD, HP, and 1 enclosure kit which contains some old internal hard drive.I don't really need all these drives on my VISTA/XP machines, as I'm trying to migrate to MAC.
I mostly use my mac for photos & creating home movies. So backing up the priceless pictures of my kids is critical.Do I really need to buy a MAC based external hard drive? or can i simply reformat one of my old drives to use on my mac. I know macs have their own file system (as pc's have fat32&ntfs).
Will apple time machine work with a generic re-formatted external hard drive.I also notice their are fewer choices for MAC ready external hard drives ...less specials than PC based externals.
I recently bought a macbook pro and am making the transition from a pc to mac. It's all gone well so far, but I'm not sure what to do with my music. I currently have about 200 gb of music on my external hard drive (connected to my pc.) The internal hard drive on my pc does not have space to accomodate the files on my external.
I do not have the "Copy files to iTunes music folder" currently enabled because my internal doesn't have space. (And I like having the original music files in a separate location as I have over 30,000 songs). I don't know how to transfer my external and music to my macbook, since I will have to reformat the drive (which would erase everything on it, therefore I somehow have to make a backup either on my mac or on my pc. but what to do about the iTunes .xml file and iTunes folder on the internal pc drive??).
I've never done anything but plug a HD in and get right to work. Now that I've got an Apple, I'm a total nervous Nellie.I just got a WD external hard drive that is FAT32. I understand that the Mac can read/write this format. Would you recommend that I change it to HFS+ or should I leave well enough alone?
I have a SimpleTech external HD that I want to reformat from PC to Mac. I went to disk utilities and selected "erase", but it will not erase the HD so that I can reformat it.
I have since attached it to my PC, but do not know how to erase/reformat on a PC (I'm a Mac user that only uses my PC for running specific programs). How can I erase this hard drive and reformat it?
I have been using my Seagate external hard drive for movies on my Windows PC and now I have a MacBook. I want to add more movies from my Macbook to the hard drive but it's read only. I want to drag these movies to the harddrive without loosing what's already on there. Can I reformat without loosing everything?
I purchased an external hard drive ( a Seagate 2 TB Expansion Desktop Drive) and was told by the MAC rep in the store to perform the following simple task to reformat the disk so I could drag and drop files from my iMAC and store them on the external hard drive:Â
1. Go to Disk Utility
2. Choose the External Hard Drive
3. Select Erase
4. Select MAC OS Extended (Journaled)
5. Click on Erase buttonÂ
Unfortunately when I do this, I get the following error: Disk erase Failed with Error: File system formatter failed? I have Mac OS X (10.5.8)...
I try erasing it again and making sure it is formatted for MSDOS and still no luck. So I try partitioning and that is also no luck. 1 part for mac, other free space because no windows option was present
I have a Western Digital 500gig external hard drive (model wd5000c032) which I'd like to completely reformat to use with my macbook pro and Time Machine (running os 10).As it is now, my mac can only use 147 gigs, and often gives an error message saying it needs additional space to backup. It was previously used on a pc to hold pictures, but I doubt it used anything near 357 gigs for that.
I have an external hard drive upon which I put movie files that I view through a Sony box (like the Roku box). I brought my MacBook in for a repair and connected the same external HD and used Time Machine to make a back up. It did reformat it in order to do so, but since the Sony box isn't a pc or mac I didn't think it would make a difference, but now the Sony box won't recognize HD. Is there a way to reformat it on my MacBook so that I can use it on the Sony box again, or do I need to reformat it with a Windows computer? I had no issues when transferring files only and using the Sony box.
I recently purchased a 3TB Seagate® Expansion® external hard drive for PC. My plan is too reformat it so that I can use it, but it has been acting wierd on me. It says on Disk Utility that it is 4 gbs but I have a 3TB one. Im on OSX mavericks by the way.
My new iMac is arriving tomorrow and I need to transfer everything over to it. I know about Migration Assistant, but I want to know if there will be any complications due to the data I have on an external hard drive.
Specifically, I currently have an older (white) iMac hooked up to two 2TB external hard drives. One if for backup but the other one has all my iPhoto and iTunes content on it, including about 1.5 TB of movies and TV shows that I have ripped. None of this material is on the computer's internal hard drive - it is all on the external hard drive.
Because my new iMac has a 2 TB internal hard drive, I want to transfer all the iPhoto and iTunes content currently on the external hard drives onto the internal hard drive of the new iMac. Will Migration Assistant handle this and will it be clear what I need to do?
I'm praying someone can give me a miracle cure here but im pretty sure its a terminal case. i have a 24inch iMac 2.66ghz core 2 duo and a western digital 1tb external usb hard drive....this hard drive was bought a month or so ago with the sole purpose of store years and years of media to free up valuable space on my iMac hard drive....tonight without any warning at all the drive icon disappears from my desktop with an error message and now refuses to load, when i click initialise on the error dialogue box it takes me to disk utility.
in disk utility i have tried repairing disk and i get the message "invalid node structure". it then tells me it cannot be repaired and i need to re-format my hard drive.
as i said there is literally YEARS of info on this drive that i really really dont want to lose, is there anything i can do, or anything worth trying. as a side note on the front of the drive it has a capacity gauge and has gone from 3/4's full to not showing anything.
I bought a WD My Book Essential to do Time Machine backups. It is formatted for a PC but I was told I need to format for my IMac before I can use it. How do I do that? Is it a complicated process? I have only been using a Mac for about a year now and am still learning about them.
i have just bought and external hard drive and want to put stuff on it. i know i hav to format it somehow using disk utility on my imac. what do i format it to so i can use it on both mac and pc? it is set to read only in "get info" and ms-dos fat in disk utility.
My Mac OS X Version 10.5.8 is 3 years old. I am having major problems with it. For the past 3 weeks now, everytime I try to use the Creative Suite 4 applications, the computer locks up...spins and spins and spins. I force quit when I can and oftentimes I cannot. I ran the disk utility from the Installation Disk and ran disk repair. The message that I received was a minor one but the problem continues....Vol Bit Map has minor problems. Does reformatting the hard drive is a good idea? It seems that I can get online with no problems. I have backed up all important files and am ready to reformat but want to make sure first that this option is the only one I have.
I have a G5 Imac and a G4 ibook. i want to use time machine, and have one external hard drive connect to both. I could get an external with more than one input (ie, usb and firewire)--does that work? Could i use a usb hub to connect the 2 computers to the HD, and set up different partitions?
And what of NAS? i do not want to set up a whole network (we already have one at my office, and i want this to be independent).
I just got a new external hard drive and have moved all my music over to it but can't get my itunes to recognize it, I have gone to the preferences and when I try and change the location where the music is itunes does not find my external hard drive. I have tried to repopulating the list and it does not find the Hard drive.
My external hard drive (Iomega powered 1TB hard drive) that I had as the Time Machine target recently filled up - I have 500GB on 1TB iMac - yet TM showed 999GB. I removed this hard drive and installed a WD USB powered 1TB and this keeps disconnecting - suspect by iMac. TM on System Preferences will not allow me to select the hard drive - I have to remove and reconnect the USB lead to allow the iMac to see it
I have a PowerPC G4 running OSX 10.4.11 that contains a lot of media files. I want to transfer them to my external hard drive (1 tb) so that I can use them on my newer MacBook. I was unable to partition or erase anything on the external hard drive from the PowerPC, because I kept getting an input/output error. I followed the same process and was successful at establishing partitions on my MacBook. Now, I plugged my external into the PowerPC to copy the media files, but it isn't recognizing the partitions on the external harddrive! What did I do wrong?
I've just installed Windows on my MacBook with Boot Camp. I decided to format the disk NTFS instead of FAT because everyone says NTFS is safer and more reliable. The problem is, I can't seem to use my external hard drive when using Windows, and can't copy files from Mac OS to the Windows disk because NTFS is read-only. There are some pretty big files I have on my MacBook that I want to use in Windows.
The external drive is a Western Digital "My Book".
Sorry if this is a really stupid question but is there a way of using my hard drive in both Mac OS and Windows? If not is my only option of transferring data from one OS to the other to reinstall Windows as a FAT drive or to use DVD-Rs?
I am using an Intenso 2,5" MemoryStation as an external hard drive. I have a few folders with pictures on it and my TimeMachine. When I plug it in it would usually show up on my desktop and start backing up my hard disk automatically. Something has now changed.
My dad gave my Macbook a new hard disk with more storage. When he put it in, he first safety copied all my stuff onto a separate external hard drive - ie. not my own. My Macbook is working perfectly and looks and acts exactly like before. But when I plug in my external hard drive, it now doesn't show up, neither on my desktop nor in disk utility. I can see that the external hard drive is responding as a light switches on and off when I plug it in and out; I don't think it is broken as I have taken very good care of it.
I'm worried that I have formatted my external hard drive so that it will only respond to a (now old) backup of my Macbook, which I can't access from my new hard disk.
I do also have the external hard drive that my dad originally used to backup all my stuff - with the older backup. Is there a way I can have my external hard drive read the new external hard drive (with the old backup of my Macbook)?
I know this has been discussed before but I am completely confused. I've got some GPS maps that I want to load onto my system using the Windows side...but I want to put the maps onto my external hard drive. The hard drive has been formatted to mac
