Seagate 4 TB external drive volumes greyed out

dr saxena

Commendable
Oct 15, 2016
2
0
1,510
My Macbook Pro (late 2007) OSX 10.6.8 is not reading a 4 TB Seagate external drive. I TB is partitioned for Carbon Copy Cloner and 3 TB contains my Music. I had issues yesterday with the Music volume appearing greyed out. After restarting via Startup Disk, the music volume appeared. I went a bit ahead of myself and tried rebooting through CCC. The system powered on with a ding, but I got this spinning grey circle and after 45 minutes I powered off by pressing the power button for 7-10 seconds.

When I powered on the Mac and plugged in the external drive, the finder wouldn't read it. Disk Utility shows both volumes greyed out, but the drive name/disk description is there. Both Verify Disk and Repair Disk say the volumes are fine. I tried switching USB cables, but nada.

Please help. I have been using this external drive for the last 3 years without a problem. It's a lifetime of music from LPs, 8-tracks, tapes and CDS.

Should I try Diskwarrior or TechToolPro?

Thanks,

Dr Saxena
 
Solution
Welcome to Tom's Hardware, @Dr Saxena!

This sounds pretty unfortunate! I'd advise you to test the external drive for defects through the Disk Utility and see if that will help you fix the issue with your external HDD. Another thing you could try is plugging the drive to another Mac OS X computer and check how it would get recognized there as well. I'd also recommend using another USB port on your Macbook and another USB cable to connect the hard drive with.
Make sure you backup all your music from the external somewhere else as soon as you gain access to that partition. ALWAYS make sure you keep at least two copies of your files stored in different locations! Moving your data to an external is not a backup solution at all...
Welcome to Tom's Hardware, @Dr Saxena!

This sounds pretty unfortunate! I'd advise you to test the external drive for defects through the Disk Utility and see if that will help you fix the issue with your external HDD. Another thing you could try is plugging the drive to another Mac OS X computer and check how it would get recognized there as well. I'd also recommend using another USB port on your Macbook and another USB cable to connect the hard drive with.
Make sure you backup all your music from the external somewhere else as soon as you gain access to that partition. ALWAYS make sure you keep at least two copies of your files stored in different locations! Moving your data to an external is not a backup solution at all! Having duplicates is the surest way to avoid data loss! Keep that in mind!

Hope this helps. Keep me posted with the troubleshooting!
SuperSoph_WD
 
Solution