External Hardrive (LACIE)

[Rachel_MJ]

I had originally purchased this external hardrive for my MacBook Pro-it worked just fine. I was able to copy files onto "Lacie" without any issues. Though one day I wanted to use my external on my Dell PC-The computer couldn't read the drive because it needed to be formatted. So I petitioned it (formatted it), but stopped at 4% after learning that it would completely erase all of my stored information. I'm not that worried about saving the stored info., though being able to would be fantastic. It's just that now, when I plug "Lacie" into my Mac, it says that it is not formatted for the computer, and "ERROR" in RED shows.


Please help me. This is such an expensive hardrive that works like a charm. Anyone have any clue as to make it work for my Mac once again? Forget the PC.  It wants me to Partition it again, but like I said before, "ERROR" shows up.

Thanks so much.

[patio]

MAC's and PC's use different file systems which since you started the format process on the PC the Mac no longer recognises the drive.
The data retrieval would probably be pretty difficult at this point unless you took it to a professional service which can be expensive.

So you will need to decide which machine you want to use it on and proceed from there.

Here is a link to 5 Mac HDD utilities including a data recovery tool you may want to try.
There is also a tool for partitioning and formatting that drive to prepare it for use with a Mac.

If you decide it's for a PC post back as the utilities will be different...

[DaveLembke]

I'd format it to a Fat32 partition using the PC, which is cross platform compatible between Mac and PC.

Getting data off of drive is possible, but not cheap. I use GetDataBack for data recoveries like this, and its about $80

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

I bought the entire suite for $180 a few years back, and it has paid for itself 10 fold since. Drives that clunked were even able to be extracted of vital data. Process may be slow recovering data depending on how drastic of a problem the software is up against, but it builds a new directory structure and grabs all salvageable data.