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USB external drive not readable by mac but readable by windows

Hi, I have a usb external drive (Seagate FreeAgentDesktop Media) which works fine with windows xp but cannot be read by the mac. I reinstalled the mac a couple of days ago because it was being very slow and I had a bunch of junk on it. Anyway, after that, it won't read the external drive. It will give me an error message saying that the disk is not readable by the computer. Sometimes it will give me the message saying that the drive was unmounted improperly by windows and for me to unmount it correctly. When I go back to windows, it's there, then I restart and go back to mac, it'll give me the message that the disk is not readable. I have 2 of these drives and both of them have this issue. I also tried disk warrior but it says that the file system cannot be rebuilt. I tried USB flashdrives and they work. I got all the data off of one of the external drives into the other and I couldn't format or even erase the drive because it says that the permission was denied. However, I could format it and erase it with the installation DVD. But I had the same result no matter what format they were in. I have very important data on these drives and I really need to be able to use them with both operating systems. Thanks a lot!

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.7), Dual booting with Windows XP

Posted on Jul 19, 2009 11:18 AM

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USB external drive not readable by mac but readable by windows

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