External Drive not working on Yosemite

gjrc · 25 Jun 2015 at 08:47

hi,

i have an old lacie external drive which i used to use to back up my PC.

i now have a new mac book pro and it wont read the drive at all. as soon as i plug it in it says the drive cant be read.

its formatted as FAT 32. i know the drive is good as i just plugged it into my work PC and its working fine.

do i need to change something on the drive to get my Mac to read the drive or do something to the mac?

thanks

/ edit i have done some suggestions that i see on line. like running the disk util list. it doesn't show. however it does show when i look under hardware > USB

/edit again when i open disk utility the option to repair the drive is greyed out.

TheUncookedPie · 25 Jun 2015 at 18:32

I've had OS X whinge about USB drives I've formatted FAT32 in Windows. It almost seems a deliberate quirk.

Your best bet is to plug the drive into a PC or router, share it's contents and transfer over the network. If there's a lot of data, open up a browser and smb://<path to backup>. That should open up a finder window and you can copy your files across.

Roughneck · 26 Jun 2015 at 00:15

Run ScanDisk under Windows seven, I had the same problem with a usb pen drive

gjrc · 29 Jun 2015 at 15:02

have run chkdisk.

will see what happens.

gjrc · 30 Jun 2015 at 15:32

still wont read it...

disk works fine on my PC?

think i will just have to move everything over using another drive.

thanks

Terminal_Boy · 30 Jun 2015 at 15:38

Format the LaCie drive to NTFS and Mac OS should see it.

Correction - Yosemite has ExFAT as the only Windows option.

I don't have my LaCie drive handy to check....