Mac hard drive partition not recognized

[madihavu]

I accidentally unplugged a USB hard drive on the Mac, got the warning pop-up not to do that, then when I plugged it back in, the 2nd partition wouldn't mount. I've tried rebooting, shutting down then unplugging and booting up then plugging it in after user login, and Disk Utility mounting or first aid. I don't know what to do now.

The first partition was my Time Machine backup, which looks OK; the second is my backup for things I want to move off the laptop hard drive. I unfortunately don't have a backup for that partition... so now I'm wondering how to get the files.

I'm not seeing how to paste screenshots.

I was reading an article for recovery - https://iboysoft.com/mac-data-recovery/external-hard-drive-not-mounting-in-macos-mojave.html - I'm on 'Solution 6: Fix the unmountable external hard drive with Terminal', and the output showed the drive was something like "Microsoft Data" or Microsoft Basic Data, I don't remember exactly, the Mac rebooted for something else (I think an update) before I copied it.

When I plug the drive into Windows, the partition is recognized! However, the files are Mac-style (like .Trashes or .Spotlight-V100) but still readable by Windows. I'm now copying the files over to a Windows drive. Maybe I did something in the drive to make it recognizable only by Windows, but I don't remember doing this nor why. I just don't understand what happened or why the Mac doesn't recognize the partition, but I'll be copying the files to cold storage just in case.

Anyway, I'm curious of your recommendations. I'm wary of trying third-party apps on the drive.

I've recovered drives on Windows through the years using various things, typically successful, but I'm not as familiar with Macs.

 

[madihavu]

Oh man, I thought this board was used more often

Anyway, after plugging in the drive to the Mac again, it recognized the partition! It's now showing as ExFAT in Disk Utility, and the command `diskutil list` shows (external, physical) 3: Microsoft Basic Data... I don't know why Microsoft's name is on the drive, but it would be nice to know!

Now, I wonder if I should reformat the partition to Apple HFS or exFAT again... not sure what this all means. Then, I'm gonna move over the files, then make a cold storage copy or network backup or cloud backup. No I'm not gonna use iCloud haha

 

[roskruge]

Very sorry to see you had not 1 helpful suggestion - my apologies.

I recently had a similar problem but solved it within hours of requesting help here - https://www.mac-help.com/threads/lost-sub-directory.229299/ - I have a 6 drive external box potentially capable of 6 x 12TB HDD. that box came with a piece of software 'SoftRaid' but it was not installed, like you in my moment of desperation I installed 'SoftRaid' then my 12TB HDD came up on the desktop, but still sub-directory was not visible on 'Disc Utility'. So now I can transfer all 100% of files (7TB) from the problem HDD to other disc, then Reformat the problem disc.

 

[madihavu]

I don't have a need for RAID nor am I aware if I should use it, and I don't understand it well at the moment. I only have two USB ports on the Mac, so I use one for the Time Machine drive which contains my long-term backup files that I don't want on the Mac. The issue of course is that it's not a cold-storage solution, and I'd like that however I'm not sure what the best approach is. I store some things on the cloud but I'd rather not pay to upgrade for more storage when I could lose that data easily due to a snafu or a company decision or a credit card somehow not charging in time.

I ended up moving all of the exFAT partition's files to another drive (through Windows), then re-formatted the partition to be split, with half going to APFS, and the other going to exFAT... I did this just to try both for different things, the APFS being for Mac/Apple-specific long-term storage files, the other for long-term storage files I may want to access on Windows should I need to.

I read that exFAT strips some file metadata that APFS stores, but I don't know how relevant that is, so I really don't know which I should use. I'm still experimenting, so I don't know the best solutions for long-term storage.

 

[madihavu]

Does anyone even know what I'm talking about now?

I can't tell what caused the problem, nor what's meant by exFAT stripping off meta information from APFS files.

What meta information am I losing when that happens? Is that even needed? I'm trying to figure out whether to even have any extra partitions or just rely on the Mac internal drive and a Time Machine backup. I don't have any other Macs, everything else I have is Windows and Android, so if I lose the Mac, the only way I can get into Time Machine is with another Mac... hopefully that's compatible.