external hard drive
Hi,
Just switched from pc to iMac... I have an external hard drive that I always used to keep photos on for my pc. When I plug it into my iMac it does not recognize it... Help
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
Hi,
Just switched from pc to iMac... I have an external hard drive that I always used to keep photos on for my pc. When I plug it into my iMac it does not recognize it... Help
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
I think your Mac is recognizing your external hard drive, but you don't find a way to open it.
In OS X, to access to your external drives, you have to open Finder (the icon at the left of the Dock) and look at the Finder sidebar, under "Devices". Your external drive should appear there, so select it and search the data you want.
If you want to show your external drive in Desktop, just open Finder menu > Preferences > General, and tick the "External drives" option
I think your Mac is recognizing your external hard drive, but you don't find a way to open it.
In OS X, to access to your external drives, you have to open Finder (the icon at the left of the Dock) and look at the Finder sidebar, under "Devices". Your external drive should appear there, so select it and search the data you want.
If you want to show your external drive in Desktop, just open Finder menu > Preferences > General, and tick the "External drives" option
After the EHD is found on your iMac you will soon notice that you probably cannot write to it from the Mac, the reason being is it most likely is formatted in NTFS format, while OS X can read and copy from it cannot write to NTFS formatted drives.
First of all - thanks so much for the quick response...
I can't wait to get home and see if I can find it...
If I won't be able to write to my external hard drive, can it be formatted for the Mac?
Thanks again,
You will have to find a way to backup all of your data that is on that drive before you reformat it for the Mac.
The reformatting process involves using OS X Disk Utility app, erasing the drive first, then formatting the drive as an HFS+ extended (journaled) format and also, selecting GUID partitioning scheme.
There's a possibility that, if your external drive is formatted with NTFS, your Mac won't be able to write in it, and you will need a third-party application as Paragon NTFS to write in it. This is one possibility.
If you don't want to install any third-party application, you must format the drive with a filesystem that OS X recognizes, and you have three options:
- "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" > if you are going to use the external drive only with Macs or for Time Machine or another clone application.
- "MS-DOS (FAT) > this option is FAT32. This filesystem is compatible with both Windows and OS X, and you can write in it without any problem, but it's restricted to only 4 GB files.
- "exFAT" > this filesystem is compatible with Windows XP SP3 or newer and Mac OS X 10.6.5 or newer. This filesystem is near the same as FAT32 but without the files size restriction. I recommend this option if you are going to use the external drive with Windows computers.
In all cases, you will have to back up the content of the external drive to your Mac, because when you format a drive, everything is erased.
You can erase the disk with Disk Utility. See > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU1.html
If you want to use exFAT, it's very important that you format the external drive in a PC. If you don't do this, you won't be able to use the external drives with PCs because they won't detect the external drive
Thanks so much for the info...
You are welcome
Your welcome.
external hard drive