External Hard Drive

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Level 1

8 points

External Hard Drive

Hi there. I have an older external hard drive that I have used to store older iPhone videos and pictures. I can plug it into my MacBook Air, and it shows the drive. I can click on it, and see that it has 144GB used up already. But no folders show up. Nothing shows, just that the drive is there and that 144GB is used. I contacted LaCie/Seagate and they tell me that maybe the O/S I'm running isn't compatible with their hard drive and I should reformat. Pretty sure formatting the drive will erase all the data, which I obviously don't want to do. Any ideas on what I can do?

Posted on Feb 6, 2021 12:20 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

woodmeister50

Level 7

20,473 points

Feb 6, 2021 6:21 AM in response to Hunter_sMom

Open Disk Utility. Then in the window, select "Show all devices".

On the left side locate your drive. You should see two items:

the physical drive itself and the actual data volume.

Select the "drive" first and click on "First Aid". This should be

quite quick.

Next, select the "volume" under the drive and repeat "First Aid"

on it.

It's possible that the file catalog may be messed up and this would fix it.

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Answer 2

Hunter_sMom Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 7, 2021 9:41 AM in response to woodmeister50

So, I did all the steps. I can write to the drive but it still shows that if the 500GB, only 44GB is usuable. The drive is not showing anything if the used space. And I know there are tons of videos and pics on this drive.

the drive shows the format as: Mac OS Extended. Should I be worried about that?

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External Hard Drive

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