Need Professional Advice

Joined
Aug 24, 2008
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Well I own a MacBook Pro & a external hard drive which is the WD My Book Essential Edition hard drive 320 GB and the story is I have all my music & movie files in my external hard drive and nothing on my internal.
A friend of mines was going away on a trip and he wanted my external hard drive to import some movies onto his windows laptop so I gave him my external hard drive with no problems. After he got what he wanted this is where is gets sticky
My external hard drive file system was formatted Mac Os Extended (Journaled) and when i got it back from him the drive states file system windows/pc Ms-Dos (Fat) and now when i type into the spotlight search engine for a file that I know that's in the external hard drive it doesn't read it. Before i would type in the movie 300 which was inside of my external hard drive it would pop up in seconds. Why isn't my MacBook Pro reading my WD My Book Essential Edition External Hard Drive 320 GB and is there a way to cure this?
 
Joined
May 18, 2008
Messages
3,612
Reaction score
95
Points
48
Location
Amberley, Canterbury, New Zealand
Your Mac's Specs
MacMini 14.3, 8.1 & 4.1, OS 13.5, 10.14, & 10.11 & 10.6; Macbook Pro 8.2, OS 10.12.
For starters, ask your friend (in the nicest possible way) what he's done to/did with your external hard disk. From what you've posted, it appears as though he's reformatted the drive to FAT32 (but don't tell him that). That's readable with your Macbook, but in reformatting the drive, he's wiped all your files.
 
Joined
Nov 28, 2007
Messages
25,564
Reaction score
486
Points
83
Location
Blue Mountains NSW Australia
Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Yep reformatted for sure. Never ever lend your wife, car, money or computer. (Not necessarily in that order!)
 

CrimsonRequiem


Retired Staff
Joined
Jul 24, 2008
Messages
6,003
Reaction score
125
Points
63
Your Mac's Specs
MBP 2.3 Ghz 4GB RAM 860 GB SSD, iMac 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 32GB RAM, Fusion Drive 1TB
Ahhh best friend ever. >_>"
 
Joined
Mar 9, 2004
Messages
9,065
Reaction score
331
Points
83
Location
Munich
Your Mac's Specs
Aluminium Macbook 2.4 Ghz 4GB RAM, SSD 24" Samsung Display, iPhone 4, iPad 2
So here's probably what happened:

1. Friend plugs disk into Windows PC
2. Windows sez "Not formatted. Format now?"
3. "Friend" clicks "Sure, whatever you say PC!"
4. Windows happily reformats the drive, obliterating all of your data
5. The person formerly known as your friend does his thing and then returns the drive to you.

Point is, it's easily done.

Unfortunately I don't think you'd get the data back even if you reformatted as HFS+ and then ran one of the "erased file recovery" tools over it. Might be worth a shot though...
 
Joined
May 18, 2008
Messages
3,612
Reaction score
95
Points
48
Location
Amberley, Canterbury, New Zealand
Your Mac's Specs
MacMini 14.3, 8.1 & 4.1, OS 13.5, 10.14, & 10.11 & 10.6; Macbook Pro 8.2, OS 10.12.

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top