WD hard drive no longer be read by my mbp

[Kay C]

hi,

maybe others asked this before but there are so many different answers I can find on net...sorry to ask this again.

I use my WD my book everyday with firewire 800 connect to my MBP which is running the latest Lion. It is in NTFS and it works good but today suddenly gone form my finder.

It is not about the preference of finder, and the HD is showed in Disk Utiliy(in grey color..)

anyway to fix it besides format the HD? so many important things in there. I have tried to unplug and reconnect around 10000 thmes, and repair by the disk utility...still have the same problem.

thank you for your help.

Ken

 

[BSD Meister]

I would think that if it's an NTFS volume you would want to check it using a Windows system, not a Mac. Grayed out means the unit isn't mounted. You did try clicking on the "mount" icon in Disk Utility, right? I believe Lion, depending on settings, will preserve the mount states of devices, so if it got unmounted it will likely stay that way until it's remounted. If it can't be remounted, you have a problem, but hopefully disk utility will tell you why it can't be mounted.

 

[Kay C]

Hi BSD Meister,

I've tried to connect to windows it didn't shown on the desktop.

I tried to verify in disk utility and it runs ok, but it is still didn't shown in finder and it is still in grey after verified.

Disk Utility don't let me mount it. it asked me to run first aid and I tried to verified it, and also repair, nothing wrong shown in the log.

The hard drive should be in NTFS format but I can use it everyday, this is just happened for 3 days. really don't understand why...

how to solve this? thanks

Ken

 

[BSD Meister]

I'm not sure I understand. When you ran disk utility on it to verify it, did it actually run to completion, and look like it was accessing the drive? This should have taken several minutes and you should see drive activity. Did this happen, or did you run verify on it and it returned immediately reporting no errors?

 

[BSD Meister]

Since my previous post I found out that the problem you're having isn't all that uncommon for NTFS partitions to become unmountable. Do a google under something like "NTFS won't mount OS X" or "Mac won't recognize NTFS". I believe a company named Paragon software has a product that's supposed to allow NTFS to be used with a Mac. I know nothing about the product other than its existence.

I suspect that the drive isn't mounted in your Windows environment either, which is why it wouldn't show up on the desktop. I'm not that familiar with Windows, especially the newer versions, but you used to be able to get into the "System" sections and see what drives are showing up. You could try and mount it under Windows and if it mounts do some drive checks (if possible).

You might have some bad sectors. I would think that any of the common disk tools (Scannerz, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius) can perform a scan over the surface with the Mac. I know Scannerz doesn't care if it's mounted or not since it's using hardware control, I'd assume it's the same for TechTool Pro and Drive Genius (if you already have them) but I'm not certain.

If you need to repair the drive I would recommend doing it with a Windows system. The mere fact that a third party product exists that allows NTFS drives to be usable on a Mac should tell you something - Apple is not in the Windows business.

Hope this helps.