External Hard Drive not recognized after using it in Windows

disk-utilityexternal-diskhard drive

I have a HFS external hard drive. I wanted to transfer a large file to my brother so I made him install the Paragon HFS+ program to be able to read it.

During the process something happened and the hard drive stopped working. Now I can't mount it in my Mac.

I can see that Windows recognizes the device but can't access it, while it is not recognizable in my Mac (neither in Disk Util or by running the diskutil command).

I don't know if there is a way to fix this problem.

Best Answer

Can it still be recognized? Try First Aid or copying the files and erasing to ExFat so that you have access to large files on macOS and Windows.

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Unable to transfer files from external hard drive

Even reading with NTFS can be an issue with the OS X system. Assuming you don't have any individual files that are greater than or equal to 4GB, I would switch to a more OS X - compatible format like FAT32. This is both readable and writeable to/from OS X and Windows systems. I would reformat the drive to be FAT32, retransfer your data, and then try the transfer onto the OS X system.

MacOS – NTFS External drive issue in Mac 10.9

Following the unmount you should also eject the disc before unplugging it.

diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s2    
diskutil eject /dev/disk1s2

Alternatively you could use the usual methods: eject via finder, via dragging the drive icon into the waste bin, or with third-party apps like Alfred or Launchbar.

Best Answer

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MacOS – NTFS External drive issue in Mac 10.9

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