Problem viewing files on my external hard drive

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I have a 2 tb external hard drive (G Drive) that I use with my Macbook Pro (Retina, early 2015, running macOS Mojave ver 10.14) and it has been working perfectly for the last year and a half but all of a sudden it stopped showing my files. I plug in the hard drive and the mac recognizes the drive on my desktop but when I click on it, it appears as empty with no files or folders. The weird thing is that if I go to the about my mac tab and access storage, I can see that it only has 47.24 gb of free space. I can't access my drive in disk utility either to try and do first aid on it and it won't let me properly eject the drive either. Last night at one point I was able to access it in disk utility and perform the first aid and after that I was able to access my files so I quickly tried and back up some of my files on another external hard drive but most of the files wouldn't transfer coming up with an error saying that some of the files couldn't be read or written something to that extent. Most of my files are video files and I was able to play them all through VLC even the ones that wouldn't copy to the other external hard drive. I was then able to properly eject my 2 tb hard drive but today when I went to plug it back in to try and transfer more files, I again wasn't able to view my files or get disk utility to recognize it enough to perform first aid on it again. I have read many threads but all of the solutions tend to bowl down to leaving the external hard drive plugged into the mac for 10min-3hours (which doesn't seem to work in my case) or putting a command into terminal to view hidden files (that also doesn't really seem to be my problem). I have had other external hard drives go before but they got to the point where the mac wouldn't even recognize them, this problem of not being able to view my files I have never had before. Anyone have any other ideas? Thanks!
 
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I sure hope you were backing up both the internal HD and external HD to another external HD with Time Machine. If so, it may be a good idea just to destroy the problem drive and replace it. If not, do you have another Mac you can try the external HD with? Have you tried navigating to the external HD with Terminal and trying to open a file that you remember the name of?
 
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Unfortunately, I wasn't backing up anything to time machine with another external HD. This external HD was my backup. I haven't tried to access files through terminal mostly because I am not too familiar on how to use terminal. But even if I am able to access/see the files through terminal would I be able to open and transfer files from there to another external HD connected to my mac? Also I did try connecting my 2 tb external HD to another macbook but it had the same issues.
 
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uncleebenz
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I have now tried again plugging my 2 tb external HD into another macbook and it has allowed me to access my files so I am trying to copy as many as I can to another external HD but I am still running into the problem that some files won't transfer saying that can't be read or written even though I can still play them from my 2 tb external HD using VLC.
 
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Unfortunately, I wasn't backing up anything to time machine with another external HD. This external HD was my backup. I haven't tried to access files through terminal mostly because I am not too familiar on how to use terminal. But even if I am able to access/see the files through terminal would I be able to open and transfer files from there to another external HD connected to my mac? Also I did try connecting my 2 tb external HD to another macbook but it had the same issues.

So is this external HD is purely backup of your internal HD or are there other files on it that aren't on your internal HD? If you already have all these files on your internal HD, my advice would be to simply get a new hard drive, as this one obviously has issues and even if you get it working again, how confident are you going to be to continue using it? However, if there are files on it that are your only copy, obviously you're going to want to try everything you can to recover them.

I'm not at my Mac right now and haven't needed to access my external HD through Terminal before, so I'll defer to someone else on how to navigate to the drive properly in Terminal (I googled it, but was getting conflicting info on the proper commands and process). However, I did find this video, which you may want to try. I know you said the external HD showed up on your desktop, but you said it wouldn't let you eject it properly. I'd be curious if trying to unmount/mount it through terminal would work?

 
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So yes, most of the files on my 2 tb external HD are my only copies as I only have 500 gb of flash storage on my macbook pro and try to keep it pretty free on storage to not get bogged down. So as you stated I'm trying anything and everything to transfer as much as I can off the what seems to corrupted external HD onto other external HDs. I am having some luck now using a different older macbook but still some files seem too corrupted to be transferred. I appreciate your research and terminal might be my option for attempting to transfer what files won't transfer easily. What are your thoughts of me trying to perform another first aid (using the older mac) on my external HD after I have transferred what I could and or trying a repair using a pc? I know that the pc route could cause some file deletion. Interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks again for your time!
 
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So yes, most of the files on my 2 tb external HD are my only copies as I only have 500 gb of flash storage on my macbook pro and try to keep it pretty free on storage to not get bogged down. So as you stated I'm trying anything and everything to transfer as much as I can off the what seems to corrupted external HD onto other external HDs. I am having some luck now using a different older macbook but still some files seem too corrupted to be transferred. I appreciate your research and terminal might be my option for attempting to transfer what files won't transfer easily. What are your thoughts of me trying to perform another first aid (using the older mac) on my external HD after I have transferred what I could and or trying a repair using a pc? I know that the pc route could cause some file deletion. Interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks again for your time!

Glad to hear you've been able to recover some files. Not sure what you're intending to do with a PC as Windows won't be able to read a hard drive that's formatted for Mac without some third party tool(s). I don't think attempting First Aid again would hurt anything, so sure, try it again if you can get it to show up in Disk Utility.
 
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Glad to hear you've been able to recover some files. Not sure what you're intending to do with a PC as Windows won't be able to read a hard drive that's formatted for Mac without some third party tool(s). I don't think attempting First Aid again would hurt anything, so sure, try it again if you can get it to show up in Disk Utility.

Yeah i guess you are right about windows as I'm not sure I formatted this drive to be able to be read by both (ExFAT), I had just read in a thread about trying to repair it through a pc but had forgotten about the format issue. I usually try to format them to be read by both but this one prob wasn't. So that leaves me with just the option to keep trying to transfer what I can while I still can and then maybe trying another First Aid if it will let me, but as you stated before, how much do I really trust this drive going forward. If I get most of everything off of it and wanted to wipe it would that fix the issue to be able to be used again? Would you trust it after wiping it going forward?
 
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if it's formatted ExFat, you can try to fix it with Windows just fine. In fact, you can try to get your files off using Windows, put the files on a different external device (drive or thumb drive) and use that to get them back to the Mac.

Wiping it may make it work for little while, but from what you have described that drive is dead/dying and I would NOT trust it.
 
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If I get most of everything off of it and wanted to wipe it would that fix the issue to be able to be used again? Would you trust it after wiping it going forward?

I definitely wouldn't trust it exclusively. If you're going to continue to use it in that case, I'd look into buying a 3TB second external hard drive to use as a Time Machine backup of your 2TB drive + 500GB internal SSD.

If I have time when I get home tonight, I can experiment with Terminal and try to get you a procedure for accessing and opening files on an external HD.
 
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if it's formatted ExFat, you can try to fix it with Windows just fine. In fact, you can try to get your files off using Windows, put the files on a different external device (drive or thumb drive) and use that to get them back to the Mac.

Yeah i'm just not positive that it did get formatted ExFAT but I can check on that after. Would you expect Windows to repair it better and be able to transfer files that the Mac wouldn't if indeed the external hd is formatted ExFAT? Thanks for your time and help!
 
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I think it depends on it the drive was formatted on winOS or macOS? Bu I could be wrong.
 
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I definitely wouldn't trust it exclusively. If you're going to continue to use it in that case, I'd look into buying a 3TB second external hard drive to use as a Time Machine backup of your 2TB drive + 500GB internal SSD.

If I have time when I get home tonight, I can experiment with Terminal and try to get you a procedure for accessing and opening files on an external HD.

Yeah I would just use it as another external HD but was already thinking of the route you are in buying a 3 tb external HD to use as my hub backup of all my files. Are there any brands that you trust more? I would appreciate a procedure to follow for using Terminal as I am not familiar with it hardly at all, especially for this task. Thanks again for your time and help!
 
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I think it depends on it the drive was formatted on winOS or macOS? Bu I could be wrong.

It was formatted on macOS but if you format it ExFAT or even FAT32(4-gb per file limit) it can be read by both mac and pc as far as I am aware of.
 
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It was formatted on macOS but if you format it ExFAT or even FAT32(4-gb per file limit) it can be read by both mac and pc as far as I am aware of.
Yes, that's correct.

But, I've had issues, on drives formatted on winOS (older versions), that were not useable by macOS (older versions), and vice versa. But, because it was only a transportation device from one pc to another, I didn't lose data.
 
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That is correct uncleebenz, it doesn't matter where it was formatted ExFat, it should be readable on both. And fixable on both. Windows is a bit more forgiving sometimes than macOS, so it may or may not work better. No harm in trying.
 
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Yeah I would just use it as another external HD but was already thinking of the route you are in buying a 3 tb external HD to use as my hub backup of all my files. Are there any brands that you trust more? I would appreciate a procedure to follow for using Terminal as I am not familiar with it hardly at all, especially for this task. Thanks again for your time and help!

I've used a WD Elements drive for many years now without a single issue:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0713WPGLL/?tag=macforums0e4-20

I also have a Fantom drive - haven't owned as long, but still a couple years and no issues:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A0HZUEO/?tag=macforums0e4-20
 
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Yes, that's correct.

But, I've had issues, on drives formatted on winOS (older versions), that were not useable by macOS (older versions), and vice versa. But, because it was only a transportation device from one pc to another, I didn't lose data.

Ok, thank you for your insight as I don't have much experience at all with file transportation from pc to mac and vice versa. At this point I am just trying to transfer what I can off of my corrupted external HD to another external HD using an older macbook pro. Most likely my external HD isn't formatted ExFAT so any pc solutions won't be able to help me unfortunately.
 
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Well, how is it formatted? You can check that in Disk Utility, which should show the format as long as it can see the drive at all.
 
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That is correct uncleebenz, it doesn't matter where it was formatted ExFat, it should be readable on both. And fixable on both. Windows is a bit more forgiving sometimes than macOS, so it may or may not work better. No harm in trying.

Yeah that's my feeling that it would be more "forgiving" as you put it, we will just have to see if it was or was not formatted ExFAT.

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I've used a WD Elements drive for many years now without a single issue:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0713WPGLL/?tag=macforums0e4-20

I also have a Fantom drive - haven't owned as long, but still a couple years and no issues:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A0HZUEO/?tag=macforums0e4-20

Ok, thanks a lot for the options, I'll definitely look into those!!

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Well, how is it formatted? You can check that in Disk Utility, which should show the format as long as it can see the drive at all.

So yeah, that was one of the issues I was having, not being able to see it in disk utility and sometimes when I would try disk utility would stop responding so I don't want to try that while I am still able to transfer files at the moment using the mac.
 

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