Hello,
I recently accidentally installed new Catalina on my 6T external hard drive (don't ask how...) now when its all running I cannot access my files on the drive. I can see they are still there as storage manager showing me the size of the drive being the same as before installation which is 2.41T used... any suggestions?
thanks a lot for your time and info.
MacBook Pro 13″, OS X 10.11
You can also boot to the external Catalina drive. When you log in you will find a folder on the Desktop named "Relocated Items" which should allow you easy access to the files (see link I provided in the previous post). You will need another external drive to transfer all those files to so that you can erase the current external Catalina drive so it can be re-used as a data only drive or as a Time Machine backup drive. After transferring your data to another location use Disk Utility to erase the whole physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). To do this you will need to click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drive appears in the left pane of Disk Utility.
FYI, you should have frequent and regular backups of your main system drive and any external drives which contain important and unique information.
You can also boot to the external Catalina drive. When you log in you will find a folder on the Desktop named "Relocated Items" which should allow you easy access to the files (see link I provided in the previous post). You will need another external drive to transfer all those files to so that you can erase the current external Catalina drive so it can be re-used as a data only drive or as a Time Machine backup drive. After transferring your data to another location use Disk Utility to erase the whole physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). To do this you will need to click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drive appears in the left pane of Disk Utility.
FYI, you should have frequent and regular backups of your main system drive and any external drives which contain important and unique information.
i cannot find relocated items folder
But it shows me untitled disk on my desktop and that’s the hard disk, when I click “get info” it shows me that untitled hard disk has 3,57T and there are 4 folders there. Non of them has this much volume in. See pictures
If you did a new install on a blank drive, and created a new User, it may not be the same user as on the Old drive.
Your old files should be in this folder:
/OLD-Drive-name
/Users
/your short username
/Desktop
/Documents
/Downloads
/Pictures
/Movies
/Music
... and so on
/your spouses user shortname
/Desktop
/Documents
/Downloads
/Pictures
/Movies
/Music
... and so on
/your Childs user shortname
/Desktop
/Documents
/Downloads
/Pictures
/Movies
/Music
... and so on
/your dogs user shortname
/Desktop
/Documents
/Downloads
/Pictures
/Movies
/Music
... and so on
Catalina won't allow users to have any personal files/folders on the root of the Catalina boot drive so Catalina has probably moved the data to the "Relocated Items" folder within the "Users/Shared/" folder.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650
where do you want to go with this. there are many options, such as:
Install again on old drive.
migrate user files from old drive to new drive.
and probably lots more that did not occur to me. What do you want to do?
If you did a fresh/upgrade install on the drive that had your files, your files are not removed.
The diagram of where those files are located was posted above.
MacOS is inherently a multi-User system. If you created a NEW User-id after the install, instead of using your existing User-id, your files will be at the old location. they are not automatically moved to the new Userid.
System and Library contain components of MacOS.
Applications contains the Applications available to all Users.
Users has a folder for each User-id that has ever existed on your Mac, and the folders inside have users' files. 4.59GB worth of stuff.
Well I am just trying to access all my files on that external hard drive. I can not locate them. But when I check the Volume of the drive I can see they are still there.
I installed it on drive with 2,4T of files and I cannot find them anywhere now.
Os installed on external hard drive
