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General discussion

External hard drive to macbook not accessible

Jul 31, 2007 4:24PM PDT

I have an external hard drive connected to my Macbook. while installing Win OS on Mac, the hard disk got affected.

Now I am unable to access the drive through Mac nor Win Os.

when I switch it ON, I get the following message:
"the disk inserted was not readable by this computer".

I do not want to initialise the hard disk, if i do so I will lose all my data.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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How is the device connected?
Jul 31, 2007 9:51PM PDT

Firewire or USB?

You could try running Disk Utility against the drive, it may see it even if it did not mount.
A possibility is that you formatted the wrong drive when you were doing the install of Windows. Did you use Boot Camp or Parallels?

If that is the case, all your data has gone. How was the disk formatted in the first place?
FAT or FAT32 is notorious for loosing data

P

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Further suggestions please
Aug 1, 2007 4:02PM PDT

Hi,

Thanks for your replies. Its a USB external hard drive and I am pretty much sure that I have chosen this particular drive for formatting.

I did not use any Boot Camp or Parallels. Now are there any chances of getting my data back. The disk was formatted to NTFS. Hope I have answered all your queries.

Please suggest me something further...

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NTFS
Aug 1, 2007 9:52PM PDT

Try attaching this drive to a Windows machine which should be able to read and write to this drive.
OS X can read an NTFS formatted drive but cannot write to it without the aid of third party software.

Please remember that it is NOT my fault that you are having these problems

P