I can't find my External Hard Drive!

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Hello. I am running a MacBook Pro 120GB with Leopard 10.5.1.

I just got a 160GB Maxtor Hard Drive for Christmas yesterday, and it had been working great until this morning. I hit software update, and there was a Security Update I was missing. I let it do it's thing, restarted my computer, and logged back in. I could only see "Miss Machine" (My Internal Hard Drive). The Maxtor Hard Drive had been partitioned into "Mister Machine" and "Time Machine", but could not be found. I opened up Disk Utility, and there they were! (See attached image)

Why can I see the drive in Disk Utility, but I can't see it in Finder or even access it?

Please help!

Hard Drives.jpg
 

eric


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never update with peripherals attached (except monitor, mouse, and keyboard if necessary).

i'm sure there's a fix besides reformatting.
if it were my drive i would probably start by hooking the thing up to a windows computer and deleting all the files that start with "." (period)
 
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Oh man.

I didn't know you weren't supposed to do that. :(

Any idea of what I could do without reformatting?
 

rman


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Can you select the drive (Mister Machine) and click on the mount button? That should mount the drive.
 

eric


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ooh, nice rman.
 
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Btw, why have you partitioned the external? Time Machine just creates it's own folder and works from there. I have had no issues with using Time Machine and also having my own folders on the drive...
 

rman


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The best reason I can think of for partitioning the back up drive is to keep the back up data separate from live data. An example would be is my external drive is 750GB and the drive I and backing up is only 100GB. I may want to use part of the external for something else.
 
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Well where's the logic in that? If your external drive goes corrupt, it's going to take all the partitions with it. Partitioning was required in the days of FAT32 (on PC at least) where there was a lot of fragmentation. Now with HFS that issue is almost non existent. So why restrict time machine to 100GB (in your case) when it could just as well fill up and you will have like two separate backup locations.

If in case you didn't get it, you can use the Time Machine drive as a normal external drive to store all your files in. You can move the drive between Macs and it still gives no problems.
 
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The reason I partitioned the drive was to let Time Machine have most of it, but still have 30ishGB partitioned so I could use it as a method of file-transferring between a Windows machine.

Does this make sense?
 

rman


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Thats okay. It is that goobimama prefers one partition, whereas you perfer two. There is nothing wrong with that.
 
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How do I format one of the partitions to be visible by Windows?
 

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