exFAT external HD not readable

[The-Canuckster]

I have a new iMac (well, new to me) and I tried plugging my external hd (via usb), to it and it's not readable. It shows up in Disk Utility, but I can't access it. I don't want to reformat it, because I'll lose all my files. I had thought about installing Windows (shudder) on my iMac just so I can transfer the files... but I really don't want to. Is there any third party software I can use??

Specs:
iMac (24" Early 2008)
3.06 GHz intel core 2 duo
4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS 512 MB

 

[Slydude]

Launch Disk Utility and click on the drive then click the Erase tab (don't worry nothing will be erased). At the bottom of the screen a window a message should tell you how the drive is formatted (FAT 32, NTFS, etc.) What does that message say?

 

[The-Canuckster]

It says it's in MS-DOS (FAT). But I thought I formatted it to ex-FAT... crud.

 

[joema]

OS X should be able to read FAT-formatted hard drives. I don't know why it cannot.

It may be best to take it to a Windows machine, copy the data off, reformat the hard drive exFAT and copy the data back.

exFAT is fully supported for read/write operations by OS X. It is the most capable file system which is cross-compatible between Windows and Mac without adding 3rd party drivers.