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General discussion

Help! this is the secound time! but now i wanna know

Sep 21, 2006 4:20AM PDT

The first time happened when I was using my windows formatted external (FAT32 i believe) hard drive on my friend's mac computer. I'm not sure what happen because it was working fine but when I took it home it didnt recognize the drive. Windows was asking me to reformat the hard drive!

So I skimmed the internet, but i didnt even know how the problem occured. I had no hope left so I boxed the 160 gig hard drive for storage in case one day I might be able to save my thousands of photos and music.

I bought a new hard drive and decided to forget the past and start fresh. This time I bought a 200 gig hard drive and again, I chose Seagate.

The secound time happen a few days ago, I bought a new Mac Book Pro and wanted to transfer what ever I had on my Windows XP desktop to my new mac. I was transfering some mp3 and pictures but then I stoped. I pushed the button down on the front of the seagate and an alert signal poped up telling me that I incorrectly disconnected the external hard drive. I then pushed ok and immediatly tried to reconnect the hard drive. Now every time I do so I a pop up tells me that "the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" and I can either Initialize, Ignore, or Eject.

I tried to load the hard drive on a windows and it shows up blank and asks me to reformat it. ..... NOT AGAIN!!! GAH!

Is there any way of saving my files with the file names! I looked at disk warrior and it seems to only help mac formatted hard drive. Data Rescue II would get my files, but I wan't my file names as well. Is there a way of just restoring the directory.. or something so that I can return it to the way it was?

HELP!

Discussion is locked

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Why are you pressing that button?
Sep 21, 2006 4:25AM PDT

Here I'm just copying files from a command line or sometimes explorer.

What's with that button?

Also, I wonder if the drive's housing has an issue. Some overheat or have other issues. Try a better case.

-> In closing, FAT32 is going to mess up. It doesn't have any fault tolerance but it's your only choice if you want a Mac to write to it. Just remember it's a timebomb of a filesystem.

No fix is planned.

Bob

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the button...?
Sep 21, 2006 4:34AM PDT

the button...?the button is to turn the external hard drive off and on.

I dont think heat is in issue, Im in an air conditioned room and on the box, the seagate claims that it was designed for cooling.

I wasn't writing anything to the hard drive, just coping files to my mac. Unless something going on undetected... I was planning to take everything off the external and then reformat it immediately. I know seagate in the booklet says that sharing files between a mac and pc is not recommened but I didn't think this would happen.. well at least happen again.

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AHA!!! You can't do that.
Sep 21, 2006 5:54AM PDT

You must eject the drive or shutdown Windows before removing the power. FAT32's lack of resiliency is a big factor here. Consider using that power switch as a bad idea if Windows is still running.

Bob

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well kinda not helping
Oct 2, 2006 2:20AM PDT

you keep saying FAT32 [sucks] but can anyone at least tell me clearly wether it is fixable.

i don't know, i saw disk warrior can repair directories but only mac directories

i disconnected the hard drive on a mac (you push and hold down the button till it beeps and the hard drive spins down). usually its fine when you perform it on a windows but when you disconnect this way on a mac it becomes unusable.

i really need helpful replies please

bob, your kinda helping but i already realized that I have to disconnect first for the second time (second failed hard drive). can you at least tell if there is any hope of restoring the drive or is my best bet to retrieve the data, such as using data rescue.

i know data rescue II works but it doesn't come with the file names, i have thousands of pictures each organized, and thousand of (legal) mp3 rips from my CDs. I don't want to spend thousands of hours relabeling them. I'm in college and i don't have that kind of time for a while but i want some of the data now.

thanks

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I didn't write that.
Oct 2, 2006 2:37AM PDT

I only am sharing that FAT32 is fragile. Use of that old file system on USB drives will be exciting.

Have you tried Zero Assumption Recovery on that drive?

Also, why are files on such a drive that you can't lose? I've shared that fat32 is fragile and you may have revealed you are attempting to use a fragile file system for "storage" or even worse "backup."

There's a lesson here. I find some will not want to learn it any other way but firsthand.

Bob

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Ask in our Mac forums for ideas.
Oct 2, 2006 2:48AM PDT

I know you are wanting to have some shared portable drive from Mac to PC and FAT32 is one shareable file system. But the lesson I learned was this.

To connect such a drive I do this.

Mac? Connect with firewire.
PC? Connect with USB.

While both should work on either the operative word in this is "should". I'm sharing my free lesson so you can use it if you can. Maybe it will help, maybe not.

For now we just use those USB memory keys and networks to fling files around.

Bob

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talked to seagate
Oct 7, 2006 4:59AM PDT

well i knew seagate couldnt help me (says so in the warrenty that they take no responsibility for data loss)

but i called them anyways, to see if they had a suggestion
-they at least told me that it was probably a corrupt partitioning table
but thats all he could tell me, and just told me to search google

i was thankfull for that

but anyone know of a data recovery program that will recover the filenames too?

or a program that will fix a corrupt partitioning table?

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Links.
Oct 7, 2006 6:23AM PDT