External HD appears RAW on Win7 but NTFS on Mac

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Beatrice700

Commendable
Sep 18, 2016
3
0
1,510
Hi everybody.

I have a Toshiba external hd 1TB i bought a year ago. I've been using it frequently both on Windows and on my father's Mac. I believe it was NTFS. I've had no problem until last week.

I plugged in on my PC (win 7), it appears on My Computer but when i try to open it it says "access denied, directory may be damaged" (rough traslation, english is my second language).

I opened Disk Management and it appears as RAW.

I thought I had killed it somehow, but when i tried to open in on a Mac it worked without any issue, all the files are there. I checked and it's a Filesystem Windows NT.

What could be the problem? I have opened many questions here, i googled it, but nothing worked.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Bea
 
Solution
Boogieman_WD
Hey there, Beatrice.

It sounds like the File System is really damaged. It's a good thing that your Mac is able to detect the files and it has a Read support for the NTFS file system, because this means that you should be able to back them up by copying them. So go ahead and do that.
When you've backed up all the files which you need, I'd recommend that you download an HDD diagnostic tool and test the drive for errors and bad sectors, to see if anything alarming pops-up. If everything seems fine, I'd suggest that you reformat the HDD with the exFAT File System which is fully supported by both Windows and Mac OS X, to see if you'll stumble upon similar issues while using it with both computers.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it...
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

Judicious
Jul 31, 2014
6,050
2
35,960
Hey there, Beatrice.

It sounds like the File System is really damaged. It's a good thing that your Mac is able to detect the files and it has a Read support for the NTFS file system, because this means that you should be able to back them up by copying them. So go ahead and do that.
When you've backed up all the files which you need, I'd recommend that you download an HDD diagnostic tool and test the drive for errors and bad sectors, to see if anything alarming pops-up. If everything seems fine, I'd suggest that you reformat the HDD with the exFAT File System which is fully supported by both Windows and Mac OS X, to see if you'll stumble upon similar issues while using it with both computers.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD
 
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Solution
B

Beatrice700

Commendable
Sep 18, 2016
3
0
1,510
Hi!

I've used several diagnostic tools (just to be sure): HDD sentinel, HD Tune, and Check Disk and they all said there were no problems with the HDD.

I reformatted the HDD with the exFAT and it immediately worked on Windows. I will have to try it on Mac later. Thank you for your help! Hopefully it will not happen again now that it's exFAT.

Bea

 
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

Judicious
Jul 31, 2014
6,050
2
35,960
Well, if this was the case, perhaps there might have been an issue only with the File System. The current File System (exFAT), as already mentioned is fully supported by both operating system (both read and write), however that doesn't excuse the lack of a backup, so I'd suggest that you keep regular backups of your most important information, just to be on the safe side in case something unexpected happens. Trust me, it's worth it, after all it's better to be safe than sorry and data recovery companies are not the most budget friendly option out there. :)
 
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