Please help, Mac not recognizing external hard drive

Joined
Aug 27, 2008
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Location
California
Your Mac's Specs
Macbook Pro
Hello everyone...I have a macbook pro, and up until today it always recognized my external hard drive by LaCie. Today, in a rush, I unplugged it before the icon disappeared. Well, now the LaCie doesn't appear on my desktop but a message does saying "the disk you inserted cannot be read by this computer". I click initialize which takes me to disk utility. when I go to disk Utility, it appears. I click verify, and it says "unrecognized file system".....please help me! I'm not too computer savvy. I've been searching all day online and everything seems to tell me to "change the case"...what the heck is that? How do you do that? Is that what I should even do???

I don't even care about my work stuff, but all the 1000's of pictures I've taken of my 10 month old son are on there....:(

Please help

Melina
 

chscag

Well-known member
Staff member
Admin
Joined
Jan 23, 2008
Messages
65,248
Reaction score
1,833
Points
113
Location
Keller, Texas
Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
When you unplugged the LaCie prematurely it may have corrupted the file system on the drive. Open Disk Utility and select the LaCie. Then click on "repair disk". If the "repair disk" dialog is not available, try clicking on "verify disk". Do not select initialize when you plug in the LaCie, instead go directly to Disk Utility. If it won't "repair" or "verify", the disk might still be repairable by using another method.

Check out the very good hard drive repair utility called "Disk Warrior" I believe you can download a trial copy to see if it can repair your LaCie.

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

Regards.
 
Joined
Jun 21, 2007
Messages
83
Reaction score
2
Points
8
Suggestion: After you get the drive repaired, backup those important photos somewhere else (another drive, an off-site backup service, or wherever). If these photos mean that much to you, you should not depend on the integrity of a single drive to store them.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top