External Hard Drive Issue

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This post may not belong in this slot on the forum, and if so, I apologize and ask that someone point me in the right direction.

Here is the issue. I just acquired a new MacBook Pro and am in the process of learning to use it and moving files to it from my PC. I have a Seagate external hard drive that I have used to store photos and videos simply to alleviate congestion on my PC. I plugged the drive into my Mac and was able to view photos and play videos. I shut the drive off, disconnected it from the Mac and connected it to the PC. Upon turning the drive on, I was able to view the files as always.

I shut the drive off and disconnected it from the PC. A day or two later, I reconnected the drive and after turning it on, the PC did not recognize the drive as it normally has. A dialog box appeared stating the drive was not formatted. I then tried connecting it to the Mac and it does not recognize it as it originally did either. By "recognize" I mean the drive does not show up in Finder which it did the first time I connected it.

So I am wondering what I may have done wrong and if there is a process to reverse whatever I did.

Rick
 
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MacInWin

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I shut the drive off and disconnected it from the PC

Not sure what you did to shut it off, but if it was writing to the drive for any reason and you shut it off by powering down, you may have lost the directory or partition table, in which case the data on the drive is toast. It's better in Windows to power off the computer and then disconnect, or at least to try ejecting the drive before disconnecting it. That way it's all quieted down when the power is removed.

That failure is, however, kind of a longshot. It's more likely that the drive died. Does it spin when powered on? Can you hear/feel if the heads are moving? Can you see the drive in Disk Utility?

If it's really, really critical to you, one of the data recovery companies may be able to resurrect the data. That's an expensive process.

EDIT: If you think you're going to want it resurrected by a drive company, don't do much with it now as you have an excellent chance of making it go from difficult to impossible to rescue.
 
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Rick T
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The drive is definitely functioning. It makes all the appropriate sounds when spinning up. The PC recognizes it as Drive K and asks if I want to format it.
 
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MacInWin

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Then the directory is gone. You may be able to find a windows tool to recreate it, but if the data is really critical, I'd use a professional service to get it back. If you overwrite the sectors where the directory was before it went away, you'll go from difficult to nearly impossible pretty quickly. I've lost some of my Windows skills over the years, but I seem to remember there were some tools that could rebuild directories. The data is still there, most likely, just marked as if it were not. So the trick is to find a disk management tool that will read what is there and rebuild the drive directory for you.
 
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Rick T
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That sounds reasonable.

Thank you for the information

Rick
 
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chas_m

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I suspect that the reason this happened is that you were unplugging the drive without properly ejecting it -- a common issue.

Disk Warrior could *probably* fix the issue for you, but its $100. If there's insanely valuable data on the drive, then this is quite worth it (though I'd suggest Data Rescue instead, since there's a "demo" version of that). If the data on the drive isn't that valuable, I'd say use that $100 towards buying a new drive.
 

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