Unable to see External HD

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All,

i plugged my External HD i used to save all my music,films and photos form my PC that broke into my Imac

It picked it up fine. i moved some music and photos off and that worked fine but i then knocked out the USB lead going into the HD.

When i plugged it back in the IMAC can not see it. Does anybody have any suggestions
 

chscag

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First, make sure the USB cable wasn't damaged when the drive was accidently removed. Try another cable, try another USB port. Reboot the machine.

If no joy, attach the HD and open Disk Utility (Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility.app). Can you see the drive?

Regards.
 

chscag

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OK, Disk Utility can see the drive. That's good. What format is the drive using? FAT-32? NTFS?

If the drive is formatted to FAT-32, try running a verify and repair from Disk Utility. If the drive is formatted to NTFS, it's going to be read only - verify and repair won't work.

Regards.
 
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Hi the disk has partition in which the mac pick up fine when i highligt the main bulk of the disk wher i am trying to get into and verify it just looks at the partition even though i have highlighted the other part? does this make sense
 
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basically when i power the drive on it just brings up the the partition which is empty but i can not get to all my folders and files just can not see them
 

chscag

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I'm not sure what's going on with your drive but it appears it may have been corrupted when you removed it. If the partition table was damaged, Disk Utility is not going to be able to do anything with it.

Do you have a working PC that you can plug the drive into?

Regards.
 
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Try unplugging the external drive and leave it unplugged for a minute or so and then plug it back in. I had a similar problem and that fixed it.
 
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Thanks guys.

you know what i think its knackered. I plugged it into a PC and it wont pick up.

The odd thing is this is a 500Gb drive and when it open on the mac i can see the drive saying 372GB but just cant seem to access it apart from the bit i partioned

Sucks
 

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