Seagate ext drive formatted on Chromebook problem.

[McCallister]

I rececntly went on ski trip with friends where I offloaded my gopro footage onto 2TB Seagate drive(model SRD00F1). My friend had a chromebook(Asus flip c302) which we used to facilitate moving files from SD card to Seagate. He 1st formatted the seagate on the Chromebook to FAT32 he said.

All seemed to transfer during the trip, but now when I plug in Seagate to Macbook(OS Sierra), the drive spins up, but does not technically mount. I see the drive in disk utility, but cannot force mount it. Within disk utility it does show seagate is FAT32. I also pulled out old windows laptop and same thing, drive spins up, see it on screen, but cant mount. Attached is disk utility screenshot. Slightly concerned it shows are 2TB used but maybe it defaults like that since it isn't mounted?

Thought maybe drive was really Ext2/3/4 so tried the Paragon ExtFS software and still no difference from above attempts.


I am not very savvy with all this & I'm at a loss here. Only thing I can think of is mail drive to friend with chromebook, see if it reads, then upload all the files to cloud so I dont possibly lose it.

Any other recommendations before I go that route? Thanks.

 

[ferrarr]

Get in touch with your friend that formatted it. Let them connect it back to their Chromebook, to confirm all data is still there.
Then move all files back to chromebook.
Next format the drive with your Mac.
Then move all the files back to external drive.
Finally copy all your data to your Mac.

 

[chscag]

It appears the drive was not formatted correctly by the Chromebook. Notice that the drive ID is missing which is why it shows that all 2 GB have been used. You're going to be lucky if your files are there. Hopefully you have a backup.

 

[McCallister]

Thanks for the advice. I dodged a bullet. That same friend luckily knows his stuff. He remoted onto my mac since he lives out of state, installed windows VM, tinkered some, ran recovery software in VM, linked folder paths from vm to mac, then transferred the files onto drives I had that I knew worked on my Mac. Took 5 hrs but worked. Sounds like he thought drive was formatted prior to putting footage on drive, but still really had Mac formatting and somehow placed FAT32 on top of that..? I'd have been screwed otherwise so props to all you people who understand all this stuff better than I.