External Hard drive not mounting onto Late 2013 Macbook Pro

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I've had my Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive for about 2 year. Last time I used it was in December to transfer many photos and it woked fine. I tried it agian maybe a week ago to transfer more data to create room for a big app I am currently using and the Drive doesn't pop up on the desktop like it used to. I searched for the drive on Disk Utilities showing the drive is there but not able to mount when I click mount. Any suggestions guys?

I took a screenshot of the info on the Drive.

Screen Shot 2017-02-19 at 6.04.42 PM.png
 
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chscag

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Welcome to our forums.

Thanks for posting the screen shot. I have to ask.... why is the drive formatted to NTFS? I realize that's the way it came from the factory but I would have thought that you would have re-formatted it for your Mac? Also, if you notice.... Disk Utility is telling you that the drive is "uninitialized". As long as it's in that state, it won't mount on your desktop.

You will need to use Disk Utility to format the drive to HFS+ (Mac Extended Journaled) and to the GUID scheme before it will mount. There is a possibility that the drive may have problems since it's two years old and hasn't been used. Also keep in mind that if you have data on the drive it will be destroyed if you format it.
 
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That screen shot says that volume (drive) partition is Uninitalized Windows NT Filesystem.

Not the best option for Mac OS use.






- Patrick
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Welcome to our forums.

Thanks for posting the screen shot. I have to ask.... why is the drive formatted to NTFS? I realize that's the way it came from the factory but I would have thought that you would have re-formatted it for your Mac? Also, if you notice.... Disk Utility is telling you that the drive is "uninitialized". As long as it's in that state, it won't mount on your desktop.

You will need to use Disk Utility to format the drive to HFS+ (Mac Extended Journaled) and to the GUID scheme before it will mount. There is a possibility that the drive may have problems since it's two years old and hasn't been used. Also keep in mind that if you have data on the drive it will be destroyed if you format it.

I have no idea why it is in NTFS format but I have not changed a thing since I received the drive brand new. I do have data on it and am thinking of exporting all my files into my friends Windows computer. Reformatting to the proper format as you mentioned. Then bringing the files back if possible. What do you think?

I don't understand why it changed and my worry is that all my data will be gone which was quite a lot of photos and thousands on thousands of music and sheets.
 
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That screen shot says that volume (drive) partition is Uninitalized Windows NT Filesystem.

Not the best option for Mac OS use.






- Patrick
==========

I am aware but I haven't changed the format and it was working fine a little over two months ago.
 

chscag

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I have no idea why it is in NTFS format but I have not changed a thing since I received the drive brand new. I do have data on it and am thinking of exporting all my files into my friends Windows computer. Reformatting to the proper format as you mentioned. Then bringing the files back if possible. What do you think?

I don't understand why it changed and my worry is that all my data will be gone which was quite a lot of photos and thousands on thousands of music and sheets.

If you can extract or copy the data off the drive using a Windows computer, that would be best. That particular drive came from the factory formatted to NTFS and unless you used a special driver on your Mac to write to it, it would not be possible. Macs can read a NTFS drive but not write to it without a special driver. Be careful with that drive when extracting or copying data using Windows. It might be a good idea to use "chkdsk" (Windows program) to check the drive for errors first.
 
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Macs can read a NTFS drive but not write to it without a special driver.


That's what struck me as strange and just wondered how the drive was actually used previously.

I'd agree as you say,
If you can extract or copy the data off the drive using a Windows computer, that would be best.

Hopefully the data can be saved.






- Patrick
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