External Hard Drive Issue

[FidelisVernula]

I'm looking for an outside opinion/idea on this issue I'm having, and I'm hoping someone here can help...

I work for a media department, and we were having issues with an external hard drive ejecting itself with the slightly move of the desk, cord, etc. After looking at it, I determined that the port for the USB3.0 cable is faulty. We need more internal space on one of our Mac Pros, so I figured I'd take it out of the enclosure, like I've done many times before, and add it to our Mac Pro.

Here's the issue: When I put it in the Mac Pro and fired it up, the Mac states that the drive is unreadable, and I need to format it, and the same goes for when I put it in a docking bay and hook it up to my MBpro, but when hooking it up to one of our old Windows XP computers, it works. Both Macs read that the drive is empty, but it obviously isn't with roughly 1.1TB of video stored on it.

It's FAT32 which may help, but I know it's not the drive (per se...since it does work), and it definitely not either Mac.

I know it's a long post, but any ideas on what to do?

 

[FidelisVernula]

When firing the drive up...this is the window I get:

 

[harryb2448]

Obviously it is early Windows formatting. If you are going to use it with the solely with the Macs format Mac OS Extended (Journalled) which will of course wipe all information. A program called OSX Fuse may help. Fat32 is readable by Macs so something is a little odd. With the drive connected, does it appear in Disk Utility by any chance?

http://osxfuse.github.com

 

[chscag]

I've never seen a large (over 1 TB) drive used in Windows that was FAT-32 formatted. Too much slack space with such large clusters. Are you sure that drive is not formatted to NTFS as that makes more sense.... ?

 

[FidelisVernula]

Obviously it is early Windows formatting. If you are going to use it with the solely with the Macs format Mac OS Extended (Journalled) which will of course wipe all information. A program called OSX Fuse may help. Fat32 is readable by Macs so something is a little odd. With the drive connected, does it appear in Disk Utility by any chance?

Home - FUSE for OS X

It is an older drive, but still fairly new...It was one of the original WD to ship with USB3.0, based on my best guess...the drive has been around since before I was hired. I had already planned on wiping it, I just needed a mac to read it so I could get the files off.

I've never seen a large (over 1 TB) drive used in Windows that was FAT-32 formatted. Too much slack space with such large clusters. Are you sure that drive is not formatted to NTFS as that makes more sense.... ?

Oh, I agree, a drive formatted NTFS would make much more sense, but it is, in fact, FAT32. I also know it's not NTFS, because I haven't installed any drivers on the Mac for it to be able to write to the drive. Personally, had I been around when we purchased the drive, I would have formatted it exFAT since it was still being used for Windows/Mac for video. It was readable/writable for a long time on the Mac and just stopped once I tried to dock it internally.

Luckily, the new drive we just purchased, I formatted exFAT, so I can use one of our XP machines to copy the content off.