hard drive Can't get inside a Mac formatted drive on Windows 10

[Messquito]

Hi all,

 

I'm at a dead end.

I need to get footage from a "LaCie Rugged FW/USB USB Device", but I can't seem to access it.

1. - It's visible at Device Manager and in the taskbar where you can safely remove hardware and eject media.
2. - Tried to make HFSExplorer explore the external hard drive, but the software doesn't seem to find it.
3. - Installed (the free version of) MiniTool Partition, but in vain.

• I can see the folder I need when I ran a recovery, but to extract it from the drive I need to buy the software and I don't think that should be necessary.

It's not the first time I have a Mac formatted external drive attached to my Windows PC, so I have no idea what's going on with this one. When I look at it inside Computer Management it shows 298.08 GB of Unallocated storage/files.

Anyone here that can think of a solution and help me out?

 

Thanks!

[Tarry Hesticle]

Do you remember what you formatted it to? I'm pretty sure that if you formatted it to ext4 or something. which windows doesn't like.

[Kilrah]

He said it's a mac drive. And yes it's a pain to read those on Windows with anything but paid software.

Are you sure it's HFS? It could be the newer APFS, which is even more a pain and AFAIK apart from one paid software there's just no getting at them.

[Tarry Hesticle]

Well, you could format the drive to fat32, plug it back into your mac and copy the files again.

[BrinkGG]

3 minutes ago, Messquito said:

Hi all,

 

I'm at a dead end.

I need to get footage from a "LaCie Rugged FW/USB USB Device", but I can't seem to access it.

1. - It's visible at Device Manager and in the taskbar where you can safely remove hardware and eject media.
2. - Tried to make HFSExplorer explore the external hard drive, but the software doesn't seem to find it.
3. - Installed (the free version of) MiniTool Partition, but in vain.

• I can see the folder I need when I ran a recovery, but to extract it from the drive I need to buy the software and I don't think that should be necessary.

It's not the first time I have a Mac formatted external drive attached to my Windows PC, so I have no idea what's going on with this one. When I look at it inside Computer Management it shows 298.08 GB of Unallocated storage/files.

Anyone here that can think of a solution and help me out?

 

Thanks!

Do you happen to know EXACTLY what format the drive is in? (MacOS Extended, APFS, or exFat are the most common) Knowing this will make getting into the drive a lot easier. 

Once you know the exact format, you'll better know what programs to use to get access.

My honest recommendation is to find someone/somewhere with a Mac to read it for you and transfer data off. If you can't do that, try HFS+ by Paragon. 

If that doesn't work, you can also look into Seagate's Paragon Driver for windows Here.

If your windows build is older than the Anniversary update, you can look into the HFS drivers for windows, Here.

And if you haven't already, you can also look at MacDrive which should include the HFS+ drivers. 

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

He said it's a mac drive. And yes it's a pain to read those on Windows with anything but paid software.

Are you sure it's HFS? It could be the newer APFS, which is even more a pain and AFAIK apart from one paid software there's just no getting at them.

Yeah that or Linux with pulled APFS drivers. They're a pain and I usually recommend formatting with a compatible format beforehand, but that's not an option here. 

 

3 minutes ago, Tarry Hesticle said:

Well, you could format the drive to fat32, plug it back into your mac and copy the files again.

Not an option if he needs to get existing data off of it. 

[Kilrah]

You're assuming the files are stored somewhere else... which is really not a given.

[Tarry Hesticle]

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I meant that he should be able to open the drive on his mac, back up the files to the mac, format it to fat32, then copy the files back to the drive, and be able to then view/access them on the Windows machine.

[BrinkGG]

Just now, Tarry Hesticle said:

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I meant that he should be able to open the drive on his mac, back up the files to the mac, format it to fat32, then copy the files back to the drive, and be able to then view/access them on the Windows machine.

Nowhere does he say he has a mac. Pretty sure OP doesn't have access to a mac which is why he's asking here.

[Messquito]

Thanks everyone. I will try to figure out to what the drive is formatted to. I don't have a Mac at hand, so unfortunately I need to do it just with Windows atm.
So far only Minitool recognized the drive, but I will also try HFS+ from paragon and see where this leads to.

[Kilrah]

Regardless of which tool you use I recommend mounting the drive as read only. I have both Paragon HFS and APFS and even if it's supposed to work it's happened that after writing a drive wasn't even readable by a mac anymore.

[Messquito]

4 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Regardless of which tool you use I recommend mounting the drive as read only. I have both Paragon HFS and APFS and even if it's supposed to work it's happened that after writing a drive wasn't even readable by a mac anymore.

 

 

31 minutes ago, BrinkGG said:

Do you happen to know EXACTLY what format the drive is in? (MacOS Extended, APFS, or exFat are the most common) Knowing this will make getting into the drive a lot easier. 

Once you know the exact format, you'll better know what programs to use to get access.

My honest recommendation is to find someone/somewhere with a Mac to read it for you and transfer data off. If you can't do that, try HFS+ by Paragon. 

If that doesn't work, you can also look into Seagate's Paragon Driver for windows Here.

If your windows build is older than the Anniversary update, you can look into the HFS drivers for windows, Here.

And if you haven't already, you can also look at MacDrive which should include the HFS+ drivers. 

Yeah that or Linux with pulled APFS drivers. They're a pain and I usually recommend formatting with a compatible format beforehand, but that's not an option here. 

 

Not an option if he needs to get existing data off of it. 

It's formatted to HSF+.

I downloaded HFS+ paragon and MacDrive 10. At the moment my pc is uploading some footage from another drive, so I need to wait a moment, but will give my reply later on.

 

Thanks again guys!

[Messquito]

Just now, Messquito said:

 

 

It's formatted to HSF+.

I downloaded HFS+ paragon and MacDrive 10. At the moment my pc is uploading some footage from another drive, so I need to wait a moment, but will give my reply later on.

 

Thanks again guys!

I need to wait, because the software will (apparently) only work after I've restarted my pc

[BrinkGG]

1 minute ago, Messquito said:

I need to wait, because the software will (apparently) only work after I've restarted my pc

This sounds pretty normal since you're installing non-standard drivers with MacDrive and Paragon for HFS+

[Messquito]

3 hours ago, BrinkGG said:

This sounds pretty normal since you're installing non-standard drivers with MacDrive and Paragon for HFS+

Alright, so I could finally restart my pc and took a look with HFS+ Paragon, what didn't find the disk. And MacDrive 10, that sees the disk only when I open the MacDrive Disk Manager. Here I can't do anything else except for initializing disk.

 

I will download the other software programs you, BrinkGG, described, but I don't have high hopes for it.

[Messquito]

This is what HFSExplorer says:

 

It is obvious what it tells me, but I still don't understand in such case why all software programs won't work (except for Minitool Partition).

 

In the meantime I will keep searching for a solution that doesn't include a Mac device.

[Messquito]

Alright, I went to a place where I could access a Mac and even the Mac couldn't read the drive. It's probably just corrupted and can't be worked with. This thread can be closed.

 

Thanks guys for the quick replies!

[BrinkGG]

1 hour ago, Messquito said:

Alright, I went to a place where I could access a Mac and even the Mac couldn't read the drive. It's probably just corrupted and can't be worked with. This thread can be closed.

 

Thanks guys for the quick replies!

That explains why nothing was able to read it then  If this turns into a data recovery problem, feel free to make a new thread about it.