Help/Support MacBook + External HD Mounting Issue

[Asclepius 425 12 9.3.3]

Hey iOSGods community

 

As the title says, I have run into an issue with my external hard drive. My entire life is on this damn thing (curse the limited space on a MacBook Air ) and for some reason, it will not mount to my MacBook. I've gone to disk utility > verify > repair, but my Mac is telling me I need to reformat the hard drive because it malfunctioned. Prior to this, it did mount to my Mac, but it froze up on me, so I tried to eject it, but it wouldn't so I unplugged it (i've done this force ejection about 4-6 times before), and it usually would fix itself when I went back to disk utility and hit repair. But this time, it did not. 

 

So, my next step was to see if it will mount on another computer. I go to a windows computer (my hard drive was formatted to allow both write options to windows and mac) and it mounts just fine. However, there seems to be a problem when I try to copy files off of the hard drive, and onto windows. It will show a copying progress bar saying preparing __% and then the window will force close itself. Sometimes when I do this, the entire desktop screen will just crash and reboot itself. Writing to the hard drive doesn't seem like a problem either, because I've copied an image from the windows computer to the external hard drive and it copied just fine.

 

Now that it mounted on windows, I thought, hey, it should work fine now on my Mac. I safely unmount it from windows, and try plugging it back into my Mac, and it doesn't show up on the desktop like it usually would. I went to disk utility again, and I see here "Passbook" greyed out and listed as unmounted yet again. I try to mount it, but it keeps telling me that there is an error, and that there is a program that is using this disk. Which I will add, nothing is using this external hard drive. I even try to 'eject' it from the disk utility window, but it fails saying that a program is using this disk. 

 

With no way to eject the external hard drive, i unplug it again and so I finally plug it back into my windows computer. A message pops up saying that it needs to be repaired. It is currently undergoing the scan and repair, but I have no idea if it's even working or not because the status bar isn't even moving

 

I have no idea what to do now I've tried this ketix utility thing I've read online, and that didn't work. Is there a way I can pull out the data from my hard drive even though it's not mounted on my Mac? As a last ditch effort, do you guys think if I brought into somewhere like OfficeMax/BestBuy, they'll be able to pull my data off of it for me?

 

Thanks in advance to those that are willing to help me. Appreciate it very much.

 

- Asclepius

[smokey 2.8k 25 8.1.0]

Sounds like your data got corrupted

[Asclepius 425 12 9.3.3]

Sounds like your data got corrupted

Noooo~~~ lmao. I refuse to believe that I am currently waiting on this repair/scanning process on this windows machine to see if it'll repair it at all or anything like that. I hope it does something

[Rook 552.6k iPad Pro (2nd gen) 17.4 Donor]

I've had a similar problem before. Except my whole Hard Drive was broken. I couldn't even format it if I wanted tyo. All data lost

 

Try scanning it with some HDD tools and programs. I don't remember any but Google search?