Lion not reading USB HD

Hi everyone.

I recently upgraded to Lion from Snow L. on a 2-month old MacBook Pro. I switched to Mac from PC when I bought this Pro, which came with SL.

I use a USB Trekstor external hard drive to store my files. Until the upgrade, SL had no problem reading my drive, but Lion has not been able to read it though I've left it on even overnight.

I have a screencap of the situation below:

Trekstor USB Lion issue

I have no idea why it says created in 1969! It's not even 4 years old.

As you can see this is an FAT32 drive, which as far as I know shouldn't cause problems on Lion. Lion is detecting the drive when it's plugged in, an icon is visible on the desktop, and the data is clearly still there, but the files never show up in the Finder window to access.

Following suggestions in other threads, I have tried:

a) Setting Spotlight to not index the drive when detected. Still nothing is displayed.
b) resetting PRAM. Nothing.
c) resetting power by turning off, unplugging all cords, leaving overnight, and trying again. Nothing.
d) Upgrading from Lion 10.7 to 10.7.1. Nothing.

The following devices ARE operating normally under Lion:

8 G Cruzer SanDisk flash drive
HP LaserJet printer

Both were used on my PC and with Mac Snow Leopard with no problems either. Only the Trekstor isn't being read, so I'm not sure whether the problem is with the brand, the Lion Finder, or both. I thought a 300+G drive might take time to load unlike the 8G flash, but even 8 hours overnight didn't help.



If possible, I don't wish to purchase another drive to format and transfer the data between them on another computer. I have seen other people with issues that SL was unable to read their drives when they reinstalled it when downgrading from Lion, so I don't want to risk this either.

Can any solutions be found or is this an unaddressed Lion bug?

Thanks for your help.

It could be that the drive has failed or is failing. I know you said it was working OK with Snow Leopard, but it may be coincidental that the drive has quit at the same time you upgraded to Lion.

I have four external USB drives and they all work fine after upgrading to Lion from Snow Leopard.

Run Disk Utility and do a verify and repair on the drive. Let's see what it reports back (if anything).

Thanks very much. Regrettably, you were correct.

I ran Disk Utility Verify and Repair on the drive, and it came back well and good, but with the same issue: 320 G, 13G free, but 0 folders and 0 files.

I got hold on a PC netbook and tried mounting the drive there. Unfortunately, all the same numbers came up again and nothing was showing up in Explorer.

It is the drive's fault, not Lion's. I should have anticipated 4 years would be the life of it, but at least the data is still there.

I think I'm going to have spend even more money now on disc recovery programs on top of a new drive. *sigh* Such is life.

Glad to hear you got it figured out. As for data recovery software, anything that's worth while for OS X is going to cost. I personally use and recommend Data Rescue 3 from ProSoft, however, it's a bit pricey at $99.00.

Thanks, yes I've bought Data Rescue 3 and running it. A Quick Scan did not detect any files, but a Deep Scan is finding them.

I see this as a worthy sacrifice and lesson learned, and bought a brand new drive and a few small flash drives to triple backup the especially sensitive files.

At least it's an investment that can last a while and use if I run into other drive problems.