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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)

Posted on Feb 19, 2013 8:23 AM

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Posted on Feb 19, 2013 8:33 AM

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

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Question marked as Best reply

Feb 19, 2013 8:33 AM in response to jsaba711

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

Feb 19, 2013 8:59 AM in response to jsaba711

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

external hard drive

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