joshneedsmacsupport!

Q: My external HDD is not showing up on my macbook pro?

Hi,

 

I have recently made the move from PC to mac and have a macbook pro (running El Capitan 10.11.6).

When i connected my external drive (which houses the old boot drive from my pc laptop) it only showed up with one partition. The drive was split into two partitions; boot drive (C:) and a partition just for data, only the latter is showing up and mounting.

 

I have tried disk utility. This shows the entire drive but only the data partition is available on the dropdown the rest is labelled "untitled" on the summary. I was able to rip everything off the data partition but really want to get hold of the music files on the root drive.

 

Can somebody help?

 

Cheers,

Josh

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Sep 14, 2016 5:04 AM

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Q: My external HDD is not showing up on my macbook pro?

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  • Helpful answers

  • by kaz-k,

    kaz-k kaz-k Sep 14, 2016 5:56 AM in response to joshneedsmacsupport!
    Level 5 (5,789 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 14, 2016 5:56 AM in response to joshneedsmacsupport!

    If your external drive is NTFS formatted, OS X can read it, however isn't able to write on it.

    Back up drive data, then reformat the drive in exFAT which you can format with DiskUtility.

  • by joshneedsmacsupport!,

    joshneedsmacsupport! joshneedsmacsupport! Sep 14, 2016 9:39 AM in response to kaz-k
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Notebooks
    Sep 14, 2016 9:39 AM in response to kaz-k

    i am a bit of a noob at this; please bear with me!

    i am unable to back up the contents of the primary partition as the drive doesn't come up in my computer, it only shows the "data" (secondary) partition as a drive.

    Does this mean I'll have to use a Windows PC to rip the stuff off, then reformat the empty drive using disk utility on my mac, then put the stuff back on, and my mac will see it?

    thanks for your help!