Help: external hard drive showing up as not initialised

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My External hard drive is showing up as not initialised on my mac, and i cant access access any other the files on it, it is also where most of my photos are kept. I do have them backed up online via blackblaze, but was wondering if anyone knows of and easy/free way of me accessing the drive on my mac so that i do not have to have the faff of redownloaing all the files

Thanks
 
Is this a drive formatted on Windows and now you are trying to view it on a Mac?

If so, Mac does not recognise the Windows NTFS file system. The drive will need to be formatted to FAT32 or exFAT
 
ecoleman said:
Is this a drive formatted on Windows and now you are trying to view it on a Mac?

If so, Mac does not recognise the Windows NTFS file system. The drive will need to be formatted to FAT32 or exFAT
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no it was formated and used on the mac before, but has not just came up saying cant be used as its not initialised, ideally i would like to try and avoid initialising or formating it, as i would ideally like to recover the data off it
 
If you open the 'disks' app it should allow you to repair the drive without data loss.
 
john.margetts said:
If you open the 'disks' app it should allow you to repair the drive without data loss.
Click to expand...


in disk utility i have tried to run first aid but that has not shown anything yet

this is what it looks like in disk utility
fTx7Vdd.png
 
Have you tried ejecting the drive and then remounting it?
 
I had this happen to a small drive that I use to move files around multiple computers, because it is plugged and unplugged quite often I suspect that at some time I was impatient and unplugged it without ejecting or waiting for it to finish doing what it needed to.

Tried First Aid in Disk Utility to no avail, in the end I had to Erase (format), For me it wasn't a problem because the disk did not contain any important files.

Best of luck...
 
john.margetts said:
Have you tried ejecting the drive and then remounting it?
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Of course ;)
PhilH04 said:
I had this happen to a small drive that I use to move files around multiple computers, because it is plugged and unplugged quite often I suspect that at some time I was impatient and unplugged it without ejecting or waiting for it to finish doing what it needed to.

Tried First Aid in Disk Utility to no avail, in the end I had to Erase (format), For me it wasn't a problem because the disk did not contain any important files.

Best of luck...
Click to expand...

hoping to find a solution, a paid for data recovery app's free trail shows the files, and if need be i will pay, just hoping for someone on here who might know better to maybe able to direct a towards better solution
 
Try this its free https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva and it worked for me on a SD card
I tried a trial of one of these file recovery programs, it found the files but I had to buy it to recover the files without being sure it would work (I did not buy it)
 
Have you tried using another USB cable? Had this problem once on a Windows machine and a different cable sorted it.
 
Another possible solution is to find some one with a Linux computer as Linux (in my experience) is more tolerant of minor defects and will read disks and files Windows and MacOs won't.
 
I have found ports on Apple hardware to not be entirely reliable, electrically speaking, and it was also not unusual for my older Macbook to render a USB drive either very slow or completely unusable. Is it possible that you are suffering a poor connection where you plug the cable in?
 
I had the same problem on my external reformatted only to discover the ex-hard drive had failed could not initialise one good reason to have cloud-based back up.hth Mike
 
It's possible that the partition table has become corrupt, so the Mac doesn't know where to look for the data .The fact Disk Utility can see the drive would indicate cables etc are OK. However I'd try a different one , if you have one .

I suspect the only answer is to contact a reputable recovery company to see it they can recover the data.

Moral: Always have a backup (or 2, Yes I am paranoid about data loss )
 
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