Q: External WinPC HDD

I Have a 2011 Mac and external HDD caddy/reader. I have a PC which the drives were removed to facilitate the transfer of files to my Mac. out of the three HDDs only one is able to be read (500GB Drive). The other 1TB and 3TB drives cannot be read. It gives the error message That it is unable to read the drive and would I like to initialise the drive? all three drives were working perfectly just over a fortnight ago and I cannot think that two have suddenly gone bad. They are quite new drives.

could it be something to do with the formatting of the drives? Or perhaps some sort of driver issue? I'm quite concerned as I do not wish to lose my data.

hope someone can help me out.

Posted on Feb 23, 2016 2:12 AM

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Q: External WinPC HDD

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by brenden dv,

brenden dv Feb 24, 2016 8:13 AM in response to mantona
Community Specialists

Feb 24, 2016 8:13 AM in response to mantona

Hi mantona,

Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities! I'm sorry to hear you are having these issues with your Windows hard drives and your Mac. Macs/OS X should be able to read most common Windows disk formats. If you would like to double-check the format and disk status, you may want to see how the drive is appearing/reporting in Disk Utility, as outlined in this article:

Disk Utility (Yosemite): See detailed information about a disk

Regards
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by JtheK,

JtheK Feb 24, 2016 1:39 PM in response to mantona
Level 1 (94 points)

iPhone

Feb 24, 2016 1:39 PM in response to mantona

If your Mac has an older version of OS X, it may only be able to read FAT32 hard disks instead of the more common NTFS format. If that's the case, upgrading to El Capitan will solve that issue. http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/
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Q: External WinPC HDD

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by brenden dv,

by JtheK,

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