External drive not accessable

U

unbiasedmacuser

Guest
I was watching a movie on my external hdd when it paused and wouldn't resume. I closed vlc and tried to re-open the file but finder kept giving me an error box. I removed and re-inserted the HDD and found my way back to the file, only for the drive to un-mount. Again, I re-tried this and from then on I haven't been able to access the drive on my mac. A windows 8 laptop opens it just fine. The only information it can get from the drive in osx is how much space it has left (using quicklook)...This is what it looks like:



Opening the drive
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After a while it just does this (look at the bottom of finder)
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It keeps un-mounting but I managed to get inspector open
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Anyone got any ideas on this?
 
OP
U

unbiasedmacuser

Guest
Every time I un-mount it, it do it properly. After this has happened, it is un-mounting itself bust isn't showing the "unmounted improperly" dialogue. The only thing I can think of is copying the files to another disk in windows and formatting but I don't have any other drives to do that...
 
OP
U

unbiasedmacuser

Guest
bump. Anyone? I don't want to buy a new HDD to format my current one :(
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Looks like Windows 8 has reformatted the drive. if it appears in Disk Utiltiy you can format there.
 

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
It appears you were using Tuxera NTFS to read and write to the drive since it looks like the original format was NTFS. While OS X can read from a NTFS formatted drive, it's not recommended to watch movies from it. Besides, Tuxera is buggy and can cause errors.

Do as Harry says and the drive should be OK. You will, however, lose everything on the drive if you don't wish to copy what's on it to your Windows computer or another external hard drive.
 
OP
U

unbiasedmacuser

Guest
Okay so I've fixed it by uninstalling all 3rd party mounting software and re-installing tuxera again. it seems the first time I did it it wasn't enough... You say tuxera is buggy, is there any better way? While trying to fix the problem I ran into this but I'm hesitant because it sounds just a little too far fetched. For now I will be happy with tuxera but any better option sounds a lot better. Do you know if it's safe to try the trick in terminal?
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
We know about the editing of fstab, however, that is dangerous and can cause errors. Stay away from the terminal unless you really know what you're doing and have a verifiable backup that you can rely on if something goes wrong. The only third party driver we recommend is Paragon NTFS ($19.95) from Paragon software. It's stable and works. Download from here.
 

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