G|Drive external not mounting on MacBook Air M2 help me Tom Cruise

Have you tried running Disk Utility First Aid on the volume?

Do you have access to another Mac to try accessing this drive?

Can your friend who last used the drive access the drive now?

And did your friend use a Mac when saving the files to this drive?

Is this drive using an encrypted file system?

Have you tried rebooting your laptop? And tried booting into Safe Mode to attempt to access this drive?

It is also possible their is some sort of hardware issue. Disconnect all other devices from your computer & connect this drive directly to the computer.

You can try checking the health of the external drive by running DriveDx (free trial period). You will need to install a special USB driver in order to attempt to access the external drive's health information. Post the complete DriveDx text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. I will examine the report for any clues.

head_unit wrote:

Great ideas, thanks. I do have an iMac...but I think it may be easiest to ask the friend to re-load the files. IIRC he said he formatted the drive FAT32 for compatibility (he is on WinDoze) so it is weird it shows up as Mac. Mmmm or maybe better yet I format the drive on MY end (exFAT??) and give to him.

Your original post mentioned MacOS Extended.

As you guessed, that is likely the issue. macOS is more limited on file system support. Windows can use a lot more different file allocation sizes than macOS supports. A file system type unfortunately has many variations. It is best to use Disk Utility on macOS to erase the drive as exFAT....just make sure to erase the whole physical drive in order to create a new partition table as well. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility.

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support