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I have 1TB Dell External HDD which was working perfectly on windows until recently. I have used the same HD previously on Windows, Mac or Ubuntu and it had no problems - it used to work on all machines.

Recently, i used it for long time on Mac, and later now when I try to access it on Windows or Ubuntu, it is not accessible. It doesn’t show any drives in File Explorer. diskmgmt.msc shows the info as in the pic (please note it shows 1300+Gb of space as whole while the HDD capacity itself is 1TB.

Here is an image of error in diskmgmt

Even now, when I connect it to a Mac, it is working perfectly fine.

Is there any way to recover this HDD without losing the data?

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  • Check to see what diskpart on windows says, check the output of diskutil on osx, and check what gpt or gdisk says on linux. In theory, when any of them reads the partition table, the output should be the same. If not, there might be a partition table defect, causing windows to crap its pants, linux to wait for manual inspection and osx just reads the backup table.
    – John Keates
    Commented Oct 25, 2016 at 3:14
  • There's a program called GParted that can identify the type of disk partitions. Can you install it on Ubuntu and check what partition type your HDD have?
    – David Refoua
    Commented Oct 25, 2016 at 6:43

1 Answer 1

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  1. If you can network the computers, then you could copy the data from the Mac back to Ubuntu or Windows - either internal or new external drive. Do it overnight, then reformat the dodgy drive the next day and don't let the Mac touch it again.
  2. Similar to above, you could copy the data to a NAS from the Mac, for access by each computer on your network
  3. If the stored data isn't too large, or if you have great internet, you could up load to Dropbox/Google/AmazonAWS from the Mac, and then down onto the other computer

Now, you are probably thinking that I haven't answered your question of how to fix the drive and just get access to the data. My experience is that as soon as there are data access issues, you need a sure backup. So each of my answers recommends copying the data rather than messing with the disk and potentially losing it all.

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