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So I had a macbook pro on loan from school. I had to turn it in yesterday so what I did was copy all the files that where on there to an external hard drive. After that I tried too copy the applications folder to the same external hard drive. I cancelled it at some point which didn't work so I force closed it.

I ended up with a directory with a loading bar in it and a cross in the left corner. I figured this was an apple thing and I would be able to see the files that did copy until the cancel on a windows machine. I continued and erased the macbook pro completely went home wanted to but the backup on my pc and got a error saying that the drive was corrupted and needed to be formatted...

I really need the files that where stored on it. Does anyone have any idea how to get them back in such a manner that the directory structure and meta data will be intact?

EDIT:

I ran testdisk and I got the following partitions enter image description here

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  • So, you have backed-up your files from your Mac, and then tried to use the same external harddrive on PC, and it says the drive was corrupted? just to clear things out for better judgment.
    – iSR5
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 10:49
  • @ISR5 yeahh that is what happened. I'm thinking that it is because of the cancelled copy
    – NoSixties
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 10:58
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    Possible duplicate of How do I recover lost/inacessible data from my storage device?
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 11:02
  • @DavidPostill not a duplicate, as of this system compatible issue.
    – iSR5
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 11:09
  • What I forgot to mention is that I did set it to NTFS before I started copying the files to the external hard drive
    – NoSixties
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 11:14

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Your hard drive was formatted with Mac file system (HFS or FAT), and since you now need to use it on PC, you will need to convert its file system format to NTFS in order to be readable by Windows.

To Convert your hard drive file system to NTFS:

  1. Open the Command Prompt (With administrative privileges).
  2. In the Command Prompt, type convert x: /fs:ntfs and then press Enter.

(Change the x to your external hard drive letter)

After you're done, just go to the hard drive and try to access it.

NOTE: Converting file system format won't cause any data loss.

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  • I tried doin this but it says that the current format is ntfs
    – NoSixties
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 11:50
  • @NoSixties probably the MBR files are corrupted. IF so, you need to use a third party tool to recover the drive partitions and fix them. I use one myself and it's pretty useful tools.
    – iSR5
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 9:08
  • I ran testdisk and got the following partitions(see edit for screenshot)
    – NoSixties
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 11:26
  • @NoSixties run another test using Intel option (first option).
    – iSR5
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 12:37
  • Thats what I did and these were the results. When I run chkdsk I get an error saying that the mft table is damaged
    – NoSixties
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 15:18

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