iMac can't read WD SATA Drive

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17" MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3 500GB HD Mac OS X Version 10.6.7
Help me Obi Wan, you are my only hope.....
I used to be a PC dude, but I got smart and upgraded to Mac after 10 years of prodding. Here is where I may not be so smart: when switching from a PC to a Mac, I put an internal SATA WD Caviar Green 2 TB inside a Vantec NexStar 3 external hard drive enclosure and I believe I formatted it to FAT32 when I copied all my photos, music and Microsoft Office Documents from my old PC. I plugged in the hard drive, but no dice! It recognizes it in the disk utilities, but says: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." The Mac Disk Utilities notes the following:

Disk Description : WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 Media
Total Capacity : 2 TB (2,000,398,934,016 Bytes)
Connection Bus : USB
Write Status : Read/Write
Connection Type : External
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
USB Serial Number : 0010101E40000000
Partition Map Scheme : Master Boot Record

I am using Mac OS X Version 10.7.3 Build 11D50b using a 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 with 4GB 1333 Mhz DDR3. It uses an AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB Graphics Card.
What do I do? I contacted Western Digital and they said using an internal hard drive in an external enclosure is not a good idea and isn't covered by warranty. Duh! I just asked him why it can't be read....he gave me some BS answer that has nothing to do with the reading error. Hellllllllllp.....it has all my family pictures!
:'(
 

dtravis7


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MacMini M-1 MacOS Monterey, iMac 2010 27"Quad I7 , MBPLate2011, iPad Pro10.5", iPhoneSE
That is strange as OSX reads and writes to FAT32 just fine. Are you sure the drive was readable before you unplugged it from the PC? Do you still have the PC or is it gone?

Even if the drive was formatted NTFS, OSX will read it, just not write to it out of the box.
 

chscag

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It's possible you exceeded the capacity of the Vantec NextStar 3 enclosure by inserting the 2 TB drive. Do you have any support documents for the Vantec which could tell you what max capacity drive it can accommodate?
 
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DevilDocHudson
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That is strange as OSX reads and writes to FAT32 just fine. Are you sure the drive was readable before you unplugged it from the PC? Do you still have the PC or is it gone?

Even if the drive was formatted NTFS, OSX will read it, just not write to it out of the box.

Initially when I used the drive, I had installed it into an open bay on my Dell XPS, and was able write to it okay. I was able to read and alter docs etc. But when we sold the PC and moved, thats when I put it in the enclosure. After reading the NexStar 3 documentation, it doesn't seem to state that it has a drive size limit. When I asked the techs where I bought the hard drive enclosure, they said that NexStar is what they recommend most for the WD Caviar drives. I don't have the original PC. Any ideas?
 
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I have the same problem and thought this may help us find an answer or someone who knows. When I run gpt recover /dev/disk[id] I get this message

error: device contains a MBR

I didnt have my drive connected to a PC but I had it in an external USB enclosure connected to a Ubuntu machine. I was only using this as an external hard drive so I dont know why it would say it has a MBR. Maybe cause i had it automounted via fstab? Gonna keep looking but hopefully this might help a little.
 

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