External drive not recognized

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hello,
A friend gave me an 80 GB HDD with some data that he added using a PC. When I plug it into my new MB, it is not recognized by the MB and I can't figure out why. I know the HDD is working as I can feel it spinning and when I plug it into a PC, I can see the drive and the data. But it does not show up in my Finder window or on my desktop when I plug it into my MB.

HOWEVER, the first time I plugged it in and this happened, I waited awhile and finally gave up. Since there was no icon available to eject, I simply unplugged it. This resulted in 5 or 6 "unnamed folders" being created in my Finder window (named: "Unnamed Folder 1," Unnamed Folder 2" etc...) that had eject buttons next to them. They were empty and when I ejected each. I got a message telling me that I was not ejecting them all unless I chose to eject all volumes.

What is going on and how can I fix it?

Thanks!
Charlie
 

chscag

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The 80 Gb hard drive your friend gave you may be formatted to NTFS and has no label but it should have shown up on your desktop anyway.

Plug the drive into your Mac again and open Disk Utility from Applications, Utilities. Does Disk Utility show the drive?

As for the folders that showed up in Finder, go ahead and select "eject all volumes". That should get rid of them.

Post back and we can go from there.

Regards.
 
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axis42
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Hi,
Thanks for the help. I plugged the drive in again and opened Disk Utility. the drive is not listed.
My friend who gave me the drive said that there might be an issue with the NTFS driver. I did a little searching on these forums before posting and did find something about downloading an NTFS driver so I downloaded and installed NTFS 36 ver. 1.1530 (stable) from ntfs-3g.org as well as MacFUSE 2.0.3.2 from macfuse - Google Code.

Those did not help either.

thanks for the continued help!
Charlie
 

chscag

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OK, this is a strange one. I would normally suspect problems with the drive itself, however, if the drive and data can be seen when plugged into a PC, the drive may have taken on an "invisible" attribute.

I'm lead to suspect that because when you unplugged the drive it left behind folders that were visible. I have a solution that I believe may work but you're going to have to follow closely and run a script from terminal.

Read the following all the way through. You might want to print out the instructions.

Let me know how it goes.

Regards.
 

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