External hard drive not recognized

This is one of those situations when it was working one second and literally not working the next, it seems like. I had my external HD plugged in via firewire on my Macbook when a system update popped up. Went ahead and installed that, (now running 10.4.10), as soon as the computer booted back up I am unable to recognize the hard drive. Tried restarting the hard drive, restarting the macbook... It recognizes the USB ports (iPod will pop up in Finder when plugged in) but unfortunately I don't have a compatible USB cable for the drive. Plugged the drive into my Windows machine and it works fine. Plugging it back onto OSX and nada. The drive is cross platform compatible, so I'm fairly certain it's not a formatting issue (I've switched back in forth between the two systems with the HD before), but right now I'm all out of ideas. Repairing disk permissions also did not seem to solve anything. Anyone know how to go about dealing with this?

Thanks a bunch.

When you open disc utility on the Mac, does the drive show up there? If so, can you mount it?

I had the same problem, and this seems to only happend when you disconnect the USB or Firewire from your macbook without ejecting the drive first. I just left the external hard drive plugged in for about 10 minutes and it eventually mounted.

Someone told me that it takes that long because it has to verify that no data was damaged when you removed the USB or firewire connecting without ejecting it first.

So just leave it plugged into your macbook for about 10 minutes perhaps and see if it mounts.

BTW when I left it in plugged in for the 10 minutes I found that if i opened disk utility that it ran extremely slow and I got that beach ball thing.

external hard drive not recognized in mac

Hi, I'm new here. I recently just had a problem with my external hard drive. It's a WD essential 1TB. My laptop couldn't recognized my hard drive. everytime i plug it in, a warning pop out saying that my hard drive not recognized, asking me to initialize, eject or ignore. when i check at the disk utility this is what happens. the infromation i get is all wrong.
I called the WD company, and they said that either i format it or replace but there are important files inside. I want to do data recovery but didn't know how. is it even possible to do data recovery by myself without sending the hard drive to data recovery company? What should i do to solve this problem? can any one help me?

Thank you.

Your machine sees the drive but thinks it is unformatted.

First first thought would be to get a copy of Disk Warrior and hope it can rebuild the directory.

DiskWarrior 4

By any chance do you know any one with a Windows machine to see if XP or Vista can "see" the data?

This problem sucks and happens to me all the time.

I use 10.4.11 and properly eject my harddrives from finder and still, this occurs. As a performer relying on a quick set up and break down with my MacBook Pro this has got to be the most frequent and annoying occurances from a technical aspect. I've resorted to the voodoo tricks and superstitions because the waiting game sucks and is hit or miss. I've done it all---replaced cables, restarted, switch from firewire to USB, waited for hours even though I properly eject everytime...all the tricks in the book. Now I just bring multiple identical harddrives in both Extended Journaled and FAT32 to my gigs and hope by shear numbers that one will boot up and show starts.

Please Apple...post a solution.

djroue - How about grabbing the install disc and powering on inserting disk and hold C key until it boots off the disk then go into menu and select Disk Utility and in that select the HD and repair permissions. Then shutdown and boot as normal and report back if problem still persists.

It's nearly always a disk format issue. Best advice I can offer is to extract essential files from the device via whatever computer is recognising the device, and then transfer it to a flash drive, or burn it to a CD (data).

Then, as Collin advises, check the HD setup via an OS install disk (*not* Disk Utilities from the installed HD OS). I'd do an immediate repair, because something is seriously wrong with some access sectors of the HD. [Disk Warrior is the best of the bunch btw.]

To cover several possible bases, what sort of OS updates have been carried out by respondents? The combo update seems to have sorted out a number of OS-related issues.