My Ipad pro cannot read my external hard drive, why is that? I am already running on IpadOS.

Hello,

Most likely your drive is formatted in a way that is not compatible with iPad.

iPadOS 13 supports the following disk formats with a GUID partition scheme:

• macOS Extended journaled — YES Read and Write
• APFS - YES Read and Write
• FAT32 — NO
• exFAT — NO
• NTFS — NO

Lets get this straight for the benefit of the community...

Speaking generically as to mass-storage formatting:

• APFS+ (Apple-only format) is, perhaps not surprisingly, supported by iPadOS and macOS.
• NTFS (Microsoft-only format) is not supported by iPadOS.
• FAT, FAT32 & exFAT (i.e., FAT64) are universal formats that are supported by iPadOS, macOS and Microsoft.

Partitioning is something else entirely - the affect of which will have significant impact on the device to which the storage device is attached and whether the device can access the drive. Unlike basic storage drives, bootable drives with multiple partitions are not necessarily recognised by iPadOS.

So, PC users (which statistically may represent a larger population than Mac users) will have to utilise FAT derived formats if their intent is to exchange data between the PC and iPad. Mac users can potentially utilise FAT derived or APFS+ formatting if they have no intention of exchanging data with a PC - or must otherwise use FAT formats for universal usage.

According to the cultofmac website you should be able to read FAT32 and exFAT drives.

https://www.cultofmac.com/631124/external-hard-drives-ipados/

What kind of external storage can you connect using iPadOS?

iPadOS supports the same storage formats as macOS, more or less:

macOS Extended journaled — YES read and write.

FAT32 — YES read and write.

exFAT — YES read and write.

NTFS — NO.

APFS — NO.

While Apple states that iPadOS 13 supports FAT32 and exFAT, I have found that it does not work. Others on these communities have not been able to get it to work either. I suspect that it is a bug and will be resolved at a future time. In the meantime HFS+ and APFS are very reliable on iPadOS 13.