My External Drive Is Hiding Its Contents!?

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Hi from me to all users, this is my first post on this forum.

I have a question about my external drive... Its an NTFS-3g formatted drive which I managed to get running using FinkComander and MacFuse .
Upon switching on my Macbook Pro this morning to begin work I found that there are no files in the Drive, a Maxtor Basics 80gb USB Portable Media drive, yet it still shows that there is 11gb of data stored on the drive. :Oops:

I'm a little worried as I had spend last night moving important files onto the device to protect them, ironically it seems as though in doing so I could in fact have lost them? I hope somebody on this forum is able to tell me that there is a solution.

Thanks
 

eric


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do you have access to a windows machine?
 

eric


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well, that would probably be the easiest course of action to determine if the files exist at all.

perhaps someone could run you through some terminal commands to find the same thing, but i'm pretty useless in unix/linux terminal.
 
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J
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...i'm pretty useless in unix/linux terminal.

Likewise... I've had no end of problems with trying to get this drive to function correctly.

Thanks for your help eric, I'll give that a shot...

If anybody has anyother idea's I'd like to hear them too :)
 

eric


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np - good luck finding your data :)
 
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Your Mac's Specs
15" Matte Macbook Pro 2.5Ghz 4gb RAM 250gb HD, 60gb iPod Classic maxed, iPod shuffle
PLEASE reformat your drive to the mac format (NFS+) and find a work around if you need to transfer files from pc to mac like a zip drive or something. I was using an NTFS drive with 3g and I lost 13 thousand mp3s that I had stored on it! Luckily I had them on my ipod. Also, if you use another HD for time machine, it will look like it's backing up your NTFS HD but it really isn't...figured that out the hard way. When looking into this I found lots and lots of horror stories about it. Also, one major problem is if for whatever reason the drive doesn't eject properly it can mess everything up. I would say one thing you can try is plug it into a PC, eject it safely, then see if your files are there.
 
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PLEASE reformat your drive to the mac format (NFS+) and find a work around if you need to transfer files from pc to mac like a zip drive or something. I was using an NTFS drive with 3g and I lost 13 thousand mp3s that I had stored on it! Luckily I had them on my ipod. Also, if you use another HD for time machine, it will look like it's backing up your NTFS HD but it really isn't...figured that out the hard way. When looking into this I found lots and lots of horror stories about it. Also, one major problem is if for whatever reason the drive doesn't eject properly it can mess everything up. I would say one thing you can try is plug it into a PC, eject it safely, then see if your files are there.

The drive mounts and unmounts correctly, the files just seem to be not there... I've since written to the drive successfully but there is still 11gb of data apparently on the drive.

Unfortunately the information on the drive is not backed up because I was in the process of doing so at the time. Did you loose your entire contents? The drive hold five years of music production work which is really worrying me!! :Oops:

Thanks for the reply
 
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Your Mac's Specs
15" Matte Macbook Pro 2.5Ghz 4gb RAM 250gb HD, 60gb iPod Classic maxed, iPod shuffle
I don't really know what to tell you on how to fix it. I didn't lose all my files but when I tried to take them off the drive it was creating a lot of corrupt files....luckily some of it stayed and I got some of it off
 

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