External hard drive not appearing

Hi,

I purchased a new apple macbook pro the other day as well as a toshiba 1TB external hard drive. They both worked perfectly well until 5 minutes ago when the hard drive stopped appearing in the "Devices" menu in finder.

The hard drive appears on my boyfriend's windows laptop.

When I unplug it from the computer this is the error message that pops up.

Tuxera NTFS could not mount /dev/disk2s1
at /Volumes/TOSHIBA EXT because the following problem occurred:

tuxera_ntfs: Failed to access volume '/dev/rdisk2s1': No such file or directory

tuxera_ntfs 2012.3.6 external FUSE 27 - High Performance NTFS Driver
[built on Mar 18 2013 14:42:07 with USE_CBCIO USE_ALIGNED_IO USE_LOCK]
Configuration type 1, XATTRS are on, POSIX ACLS are off

Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Yura Pakhuchiy
Copyright (C) 2006-2009 Szabolcs Szakacsits
Copyright (C) 2007-2011 Jean-Pierre Andre
Copyright (C) 2009-2012 Erik Larsson
Copyright (C) 2009-2012 Tuxera Inc.

Usage: tuxera_ntfs [-o option[,...]] <device|image_file> <mount_point>

Options: ro (read-only mount), remove_hiberfile, uid=, gid=,
umask=, fmask=, dmask=, streams_interface=.
Please see the details in the NTFS-3G manual.

Example: tuxera_ntfs /dev/disk0s3 /Volumes/windows

News, support and information: Tuxera | Leading File System, Digital Storage and Streaming Solutions

please help I have no idea what this means!

The Toshiba external drive is formatted to NTFS which is a Windows proprietary file system that can be read by a Mac but not written to without a driver. Tuxera NTFS is a MacFuse driver supplied so that you can write to the drive. The problem with Tuxera is that it's buggy and causes file errors.

What you need to do is copy what data you have on that drive to another drive (even Windows) and then re-format the Toshiba so it's using the Mac File system. You're probably going to need someone to help you with that.

chscag said:

The Toshiba external drive is formatted to NTFS which is a Windows proprietary file system that can be read by a Mac but not written to without a driver. Tuxera NTFS is a MacFuse driver supplied so that you can write to the drive. The problem with Tuxera is that it's buggy and causes file errors.

What you need to do is copy what data you have on that drive to another drive (even Windows) and then re-format the Toshiba so it's using the Mac File system. You're probably going to need someone to help you with that.

Click to expand...

Thank you! I will get my boyfriend who is more technology literate than me to do that. Is there instructions for reformatting it?

He asks 'will it accept fat 32'? (whatever that means lol)

The Mac can read and write to FAT 32 drives. Will any of the files on the drive be larger than 4 GB? If so, don't use FAT 32. Here is what I would do in that situation:

1. If the drive will only be used on the Mac format the drive as HFS+.
2. If the drive will be used for Mac and Windows format the drive as NTFS. Then add the Paragon NTFS driver software to the Mac. It's well worth the money.

How to format a drive using Disk Utility

I use Paragon NTFS for Mac, and it works great.

However -- if you don't want to get that, just use exFAT. Unlike FAT-32 it has no file size limitation and is read/write compatible between Mac and Windows. On Mac you just use Disk Utility and format (ie erase) the drive exFAT. Like all reformatting this erases the drive, so make sure anything on it is backed up.

Or on Windows, format the portable drive exFAT. Mac can read/write to it, and vice versa.

exFAT is good choice for Mac/Windows data interchange on USB sticks and portable hard drives. Some higher-end cameras, camcorders, etc will automatically use exFAT on SD cards above a certain size, so exFAT is not limited to Windows.

joema said:

I use Paragon NTFS for Mac, and it works great.

.

Click to expand...

I would also recommend you get and install Paragon NTFS for Mac. I have it installed and never have a problem reading or writing to Windows NTFS drives.

For simplicity OP if the drive is to be used exclusively on your MBP simply format it Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in Disk Utility.