The contents in my external drive are not showing up

The contents in my external drive are not showing up. The disk icon will come up on the desktop, but when I click on it, there is nothing in it. In other OSes, it shows.

How is it formated (File system)?

novicew said:

How is it formated (File system)?

Click to expand...

I think it is NTFS. I would not be surprised if that is the problem.

Just a wild guess here... Download MainMenu (correct spelling for google), install it, launch it (it appears in the menubar above) and ask for Show Invisibles in the Finder section. You will see plenty of files everywhere but never mind about that for now: see if by doubleclicking on your external hard drive, if you wouldn't see the files in a folder that should now show up called .trashes.

Other than that, I have no idea.

To make the invisible files go back to being invisible, just click on Hide Invisibles.

MacHeadCase said:

Just a wild guess here... Download MainMenu (correct spelling for google), install it, launch it (it appears in the menubar above) and ask for Show Invisibles in the Finder section. You will see plenty of files everywhere but never mind about that for now: see if by doubleclicking on your external hard drive, if you wouldn't see the files in a folder that should now show up called .trashes.

Other than that, I have no idea.

To make the invisible files go back to being invisible, just click on Hide Invisibles.

Click to expand...

I had trouble following that a little bit, but it does make sense. Maybe one of your other operating systems by accident hid the files so the mac system can no longer see them.

I'm suggesting this because a friend of mine from school brought home some homework to do on a USB key only to find the key seemed empty, no files were on it and yet over 100MB of space was supposedly taken up.

I asked her to use MainMenu to make invisible files appear just in case, and sure enough the files were in an invisible ".Trash" (or ".Trashes", can't recall) folder on the USB key. It would appear she had inadvertently disconnected here USB key before it has been correctly unmounted by the system on a couple of occasions.

This is just a wild guess. I could be completely in left field with this one, mind you.

I tried it. It is not working. I read that OS X can read NTFS with MacFuse: http://hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/06/howto_readwrite_to_ntfs_drives.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558
Come on Apple! There are files now that are over 4 GBs. They are only going to get bigger from now on with HD.

MacFuse is not made by Apple. It's their responsibility to fix that 4GB problem. OSX will read files of any size. This is a MacFuse issue.


OSX has ALWAYS read NTFS drives with no help. It's writing that does not work till MacFuse. I can plug any external NTFS drive in here and it all shows up.

I had a friend with an NTFS External and when he first bought a Mac, the drive would show empty like yours is doing. Turned out it was the Volume NAME on the drive was either missing or had a space and that caused the issue. We plugged it into his PC and gave it a name and it showed up in OSX. Give it a try.

Report back if it works or does not work. It's been ages since I helped him out.