System information recognizes external hard drive, but disk utility and finder do not... ?

[amlewiscanada]

I bought a seagate 1 TB external hard drive about a week ago. Plugged it into my PC and everything worked fine. Plugged it into my Mac and it was read only so updated it in Disk utility to exfat. Everything worked fine and I transferred several gigs both to and from my mac. My drive fell off the table, never hit the floor, just hung from my Mac, and seemed to freeze up the screen a little. I unplugged the drive and went to plug it back in, nothing showed up in finder or in Disk Utility. I tried plugging into my PC, again nothing showed.



It does however show up in System information on my Mac and in Device Manager on my PC. I attempted to plug it into a third computer and the driver installation failed. I would prefer not to reformat it, but I am running out of ideas...



Any help is much appreciated!



Thanks in advance!



Adam


MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Hard to say if there has been any damage to the USB port or the USB cable (or FireWIre if that's what you've used) … You may have to reformat it but you could try another cable & another port … Launch Disc Utility (Applications ~> Utilities) & see if the drive shows up in the left column. Click it's icon (not the actual drive itself but the indented formatted disc just below) then look at the top of the Disc Utility window to see if the Mount icon is greyed out (meaning it's already mounted). Also along the bottom you'll find information about the drive if it's mounted … Report back.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Spawn_Dooley is spot on with his suggestions.

-Where you only using it to transfer files from your PC to your Mac?
-Will you be using it on both machines, or just one of them in the future?
-Did you get all the data off of the drive, or have another copy on one of your computers?

I do know there have been some reports of Yosemite having issues with exFAT drives - from only being able to access up to 2 TB of a 4 TB drive (not an issue here with your 1 TB), and because exFAT is not journaled, it can become corrupted regularly.

I agree that there may have been some port damage when it was suspended. It also could have actually damaged the disc platters themselves, since it was powered on and at full RPM. Most desktop drives don't have the same anti-shock/sudden motion/head park sensors as are found in portable computers.

Since the drive is exFAT, you won't be able to use any disk repair utilities on the Mac, but you may be able to get a utility for the Windows machine that can test/repair the directory and file structure to see if you can save the data.

C

 

[amlewiscanada]

Thanks for the responses.

I have tested it in multiple USB ports (two on the pc, the other port on the mac, as well as a friends computer) and it makes no difference. It does not show up at all in disk utility, it does however show up in my System Information. It shows the port it is in and all the information about the hard drive.

I did manage to find a backup of my files on another hard drive so I suppose it is okay to reformat this one now. I really hope that solves the problem.

I do plan on using it on both my PC and my Mac, which is why I changed it into exfat. If reformatting fixes the problem I will report back.

Cheers!

 

[amlewiscanada]

Unable to reformat it. Is there anything I can do, or is it game over?

Thanks!