OS X Mavericks doesn't read my external hard drive

Question

OS X Mavericks doesn't read my external hard drive

Dear Apple Support Community,

Yesterday I bought a new MacBook Pro with OS X Mavericks.

I tried to connect by quite new external hard drive bought in Germany, a Spaceloop 3.0 1.5 Tb by CnMemory.

I can see the external drive on my desktop but it looks like it is empty, although there are something like 600 Gb of data in it.

I reconnected it to my old white MacBook and everything looks fine.

Do you have any suggestion?

Thank you in advance for the help,

Marco

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Apr 11, 2014 7:10 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 11, 2014 7:35 AM in response to marconerix1980

I have an update:

I tried to reconnect my hard drive to the new MacBook Pro and Finder freezed. I wasn't even able to turn down the PC or to restart Finder.

I waited until the hard drive was not producing noises anymore, disconnected and reconnected it to the old MacBook and... it was not reading it there anymore. Therefore I opened Disc Utility and reactivate it.

I'm really annoyed... I am not going to connect the hard drive again to the new MacBook Pro unless you suggest me a proper solution. I tried to download Mac drivers from CnMemory website but I cannot open the file.

Moreover I'm about to go back from Italy to Germany and I don't want to bring two laptops with me because the new laptop doesn't have access to all my data. Neither I wanna risk to lose 30 thousands photos or so.

I don't know how to proceed at this stage, help would be much appreciated.

Thank you

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Answer 2

Apr 11, 2014 7:45 AM in response to marconerix1980

Plug the drive into the old computer, run Disk Utility and select the drive.

What does it say under partition map scheme?

Did any software come with the drive that you loaded onto your old laptop?

Try runnind Repair Disk on the old laptop.

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Answer 3

Apr 11, 2014 8:02 AM in response to Mark Piaskiewicz1

Hello Mark, here my Disk Utility screen (it's in Italian, sorry).

I cannoy see any software there.

Should I proceed with the Repair Disk option?

Thanks!

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Answer 4

Apr 11, 2014 8:12 AM in response to marconerix1980

Your HD is partitioned and formatted for use with windows. The Mac should be able to read and write to it, but it’s not the native Mac format or partition scheme. Try running Repair Disk on it.

I recommend backing up your data, then partitioning the drive with a GUID partition map, and erasing it with Mac OS extended (journaled) and then copying your files back.

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Answer 5

Apr 11, 2014 8:34 AM in response to Mark Piaskiewicz1

Indeed, my girlfriend has a PC and we use to share the same hard drive.

Guess with a MC OS extended (journaled) format won't work with windows, isn't it?

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Answer 6

Apr 11, 2014 8:54 AM in response to marconerix1980

There are programs like HFS+ for Windows that she can install. Having a Windows formatted drive on a Mac usually works, however if something goes wrong, most Mac utilities won't touch the drive. This is why I keep an ExFAT formatted drive handy for large file transfers.

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Answer 7

Apr 12, 2014 11:59 AM in response to Mark Piaskiewicz1

Hi Mark,

I did as you said:

- I copied all the data to my old laptop + my mother's external drive (Verbatim, working fine on both laptops).

- I initialised the CnMemory hard drive as Mac OS (journaled) with the old laptop, a copied a couple of file on it.

- I connected it to the new laptop and apparently was working but.... I wasn't able to open the jpg files (Preview was not working

- I tried to reinitialised the external drive with the new laptop but it tells me that it is not possible to initialise it because it is not possible to deactivate it.

- I deactivated it with the old laptop and tried again.

- No luck

- Tomorrow I'm flying back to Germany and getting crazy! I don't understand if is about drivers, if my new laptop is not compatible with this normal hard drive being sold in all the German electronic shops, or if everything is due to Mavericks.

Thanks in advance for looking into this, I really have only a few hours left to solve this issue...

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Answer 8

Apr 12, 2014 12:35 PM in response to marconerix1980

I'm not sure what you mean by deactivating a drive. Can you explain?

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Answer 9

Apr 13, 2014 3:01 AM in response to Mark Piaskiewicz1

I managed to have the hard drive somehow recognised by the new laptop.

Still, the connection with the hard drive is really really slow. It takes ca. 60 seconds to connect. When I open a folder it takes 15 seconds to see the content. It took me two minutes to delete am empty folder.

Moreover, Finder is freezing or crashing every 30 mins.

Do you think this is due to the Maverick compatibility? Note that the other Verbatim hard drive I tried works perfectly, and that my CnMemory still works great on my old laptop.

I would really love to have Snow Leopard back. 😟

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Answer 10

Apr 13, 2014 7:13 AM in response to marconerix1980

Do you have any drive repair utilities like DiskWarrior? I have a feeling the drive is not in good shape. A damaged directory would cause slow recognition and Finder crashes.

Again, what you mean by deactivating a drive?

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Answer 11

Apr 13, 2014 7:50 AM in response to marconerix1980

My experience with mav and external drives has been truly horrible, with it knocking out not one, not two, but 3 external drives (all different brands) and then shortly after, the internal drive on my mbp, (all of which passed extensive drive integrity testing shortly before installing Mav) and while my mbp is old now, it is supposed to be compatible.

PersonallyI would be very wary of losing the data on any external drive connected to Mav.

To clarify 'knocking out' i mean corrupting the B tree node and rendering disks unmounted and unusable.

On the plus side, the genius's at store were VERY helpful, although the only fix was a clean install of mountain lion directly from the apple server, (which i'm sticking with for now), and the loss of quite a bit of data.(500+Gb's)

I'm not bagging apple out for the sake of it here, just sharing my experience, which was a painful one. Were it not for the excellent staff at apple store I would have gone back to windows pc over this issue.

Life's to short to spend hours and hours reading forums in desperation trying to save lost data. yes, i am very aware millions have had no problem, but i'm not one of them. Back up the backup of your backup's backup imho before attempting to plug external drives into Mav.

An old 'mac head' on one of the forums suggested never downloading a free OS until it was at least 6 months, preferably a year old, in order for bugs to be squashed....wish i'd listened tbh.

Still an apple fan though,thanks to awesome staff, and even though my visit to genius bar didn't answer all my prayers, it was an overwhelmingly positive one, and rekindled my broken faith.

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Answer 12

Apr 13, 2014 8:15 AM in response to banakaffalata

Did any of these drives use 3rd party drivers? I've never had a drive fail to mount if it was partitioned and formatted properly, unless the drive was physically damaged. And by never I mean not once since OS X was introduced.

OTOH, any time I used a third party driver like NTFS for Mac OSX, I had problems.

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Answer 13

Apr 14, 2014 6:33 AM in response to Mark Piaskiewicz1

@banakaffalata thank you for sharing your experience, I am really sorry for your data loss... :/

I have two more hard drive but I'll run a backup before connecting them to the laptop with Mavericks.

Fortunately I haven't lost anything so far, and I also managed to understand better how things work.

It basically takes around 15 mins to Mavericks to read my hard drive.

This means that anytime I try to do something before 15 mins I get errors or crashes.

After 15 mins I can read and copy everything from the external drive to laptop, but I cannot delete any file from the external drive (error code -50).

Any idea?

I will write to CnMemory to get their opinion too. This hard drive has been bought one month ago and is a USB 3.0, should be absolutely compatible and still works perfectly with Snow Leopard (never had the chance to try it with Lion, though).

Regarding deactivating the drive, this is an option on the Disk Utility area (sorry if I'm not using the correct terminology, but my laptop is set to Italian). Basically, when I first connected my hard drive to the laptop, the drive got deactivated. As I wrote you some posts ago, I reactivated the external drive from my old laptop.

I initialised the drive as Mac Os Journaled by using the faster initialisation available from my old laptop (I was running out of time and the second faster initialisation was going to take several hours, apparently). When I tried to initialise the external drive from the new laptop I got an error saying that it was not possible to deactivate the hard drive, thus it was not possible to initialise it.

Thanks again for the help, Mark, much appreciated.

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Answer 14

Apr 14, 2014 6:45 AM in response to marconerix1980

I just realised that I cannot copy files into the hard drive (as I wrote you before, I cannot even delete them from the hard drive.)

This means that on Mavericks my hard drive is read only, while on the other OS systems it behaves normally.

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Answer 15

Apr 14, 2014 6:51 AM in response to marconerix1980

Do you have any disk repair utilitoes like DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro or Drive Genius?

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