Help needed with external HD

Darksaga87

Hi everyone. Having a spot of trouble with my mates external hard drive.
Ill try explain best I can. Im fairly tech savvy, but this has me stumped.

I use Mac, he uses windows, his hard drive would primarily be used with his windows laptop. I was around in his house months ago and hooked his hard drive up to my mac and took some files off it. It worked fine on my laptop, the transfer was fine.

He was up today and told me that since I had used his HD with my mac, he cant use his HD. AFAIK, when a HD is connected to mac certain files are written into the directories? Ive seen it happen with my own HD's but I never had any problem with them. I never formatted any of the hard drives as I have programs that allow me to read FAT32 and NTFS.

I connected his hard drive up to my mac to take a look at it, nothing showed up in the devices, HD's are ment to appear on the desktop, but this did not. Nothing showing. Opened up the disc utility and I could see the HD connected, no other info was given about the HD other than the option to format it.

When connected to windows, it comes up that the HD needs to be formated, in properties, it gives no info.

I ran teskdisk on windows and it failed.

Any ideas guys? I feel ****ty that I may have fecked up his device.

Edit: the files will appear when connected to the tv and he told me that files that appeared after I used it, he deleted them.
Everything still shows up via connection to media HD on the tv.

MiniNukinfuts

Did you eject it properly? I'm guessing you might have corrupted it. OR, try see if there are any hidden "." files on the drive. Mac's load them onto drives when they're being read. Try deleting those and trying it on his computer again

Darksaga87

MiniNukinfuts wrote: »

Did you eject it properly? I'm guessing you might have corrupted it. OR, try see if there are any hidden "." files on the drive. Mac's load them onto drives when they're being read. Try deleting those and trying it on his computer again

Yeah I ejected it properly, cant read the HD at all, nothing shows up.

MiniNukinfuts

I'm guessing it's corrupted so. Maybe someone else here can give a better answer

Lundar.

Hi

For mac and window to read/write each other they need to be formatted as exFat file system. i know there are mac programs that can handle, but they can cause problems from time to time.

maybe you could use a ubuntu live cd to get his files off the hard drive and format it to exfat.

Sup08

Yes, when you connected the drive to your mac originally you corrupted the windows directory, then when your friend tried to install/connect the drive to his PC, he corrupted the mac changes thus making the drive un-recognised by both OS.
As above try a linux based OS running from a cd or USB device and see if the drive can be accessed, if not you will need to use a recovery program to recover the files (that are still there) and reformat the drive to whatever is best suited for the operating system the drive will primarily be used on.

Darksaga87

Thanks for the replies. Can you recomend a program to get the files off it? Can format it once I back it up.

Sup08

I use this

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/

and other people recommend this free one

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec