External HD asking to Initialize

How was the drive formatted?

Data Rescue is a terrific app when you need it. But yes, you'll have to pick through some files and rename them, especially emails, if you saved any on that disk.

Short of saving what you can and reformatting, I can't think of anything else to do. It seems the computer doesn't recognize the drive and that is usually because of formatting or a failing drive.



-mj

If you are familiar with using the terminal, you can plug the drive in and look at it directly.

Hmm nerowolf... I didn't know that, if the drive is unrecognizable. Also I don't have an unrecognizable drive handy to test with 😉



-mj

Sometimes Finder will not recognize the drive, but the drive may be mounted.
If that's the case, in a terminal, migrate to
cd /volumes
and do
ls
to get the name of the drive.
Then
cd
to that drive and do
ls
from inside the volume
You may see all or most of your files and you can then copy them in the terminal to another drive.
You can use
cp
or
ditto
to copy stuff

juscycleballa wrote:
it was FAT 32

Have you tried connecting it to your Mac via USB?

Also, FAT 32 isn't the most reliable file system, don't trust backing up important files to it. And it has a file size limitation of 4GB, plus it doesn't work with Time Machine.

EDIT: It sounds like the file system is hosed but here's a piece of firewire voodoo with long odds against it working. However, since it can't hurt it's worth a try 😉

Shut down your Mac and disconnected your firewire cable from both ends and let it sit about ten minutes then reconnect and try. Also, it is important to disconnect the AC power to your Mac, this helps to reset the FireWire port(s).



-mj

Message was edited by: macjack

juscycleballa wrote:
... the reason i kept it fat 32 was to work with windows and mac computers is there a better format?

Unfortunately not. It's not ideal but if you want to read & write to Mac and pc it's the best option second best option. Are you running a router and do you have the two computers on a small network? Then, you could format Mac OS X and it wouldn't matter.



-mj

Ran out of edit time....
EDIT: Not that drive though, unless you can get it to mount and even then I'm afraid that it's hosed and will happen again.



-mj

Having the same problem for my Ext. HD suddenly:

My Hardware:
Macbook early 2007
HD: WD MyBook USB 320GB
Format: FAT32

I used this ext harddisk for almost 2 years and it just works fine. However,yesterday, it show me the drive needs to initialize, eject or ignore....

I plug the EXT. HD to windows xp machine and it works fine (Recognize and readable/writable)

I tried to fix it using Disk Utility but all the options are grayed out, I can do nothing to it in "Disk Utility"......

What I am doing now is backup all the files in my WD using Windows XP.......

Anyway, how can i fix the problem?