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Hard drives not recognised between computers
Hi.
Having an issue I’ve never encountered before when receiving hard drives from a client and it’s driving me nuts and eating up editing time!
Client buys new hard drives (Seagate 3TB Barracuda) loads up a TV series worth of media and couriers them to me. They are initialising/formatting at their end in OS Extended and GUID using a Mac Pro running older OSX (but not that old, maybe snow leopard or lion)
At my end I’m running a new imac (mountain lion) and using either a stardom firewire external drive bay (converter to thunderbolt) or a USB3 sata dock to read the sata drives. And neither method reads the drives, although they read my old drives from last year to 5 years back. Also loaded it into a USB case to check and have the same message: the imac wants to initialise the HDDs.
So usually, I’d say they’ve messed something up or a drive fault but the second just did the same thing and if I install them into an old mac pro 4.1, they mount fine. Unfortunately I won’t have access to the mac pro for long so I really need to get to the bottom of it.Any ideas? Thanks a lot.
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4 Replies
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More info.
I formatted a drive using the imac (mountain lion) and the Mac Pro (snow leopard) gives the message “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”
Are the format methods between OSX versions not compatible??? That doesn’t seem feasible.Thanks
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my stupid guess –
this is a guess – i am not saying that this is the problem.
When the drive was purchased, no matter what you were told, it was not formatted as HFS+.
No, it’s too late to change it now.Before you use a drive, you format it to the correct format (Disk Utility/Partition, GUID as you state in your post). I bet this never happened – they plugged it in, and dragged media onto it.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com -
Plug in one of the problem drives, click ignore in the initialize dialog, go to terminal and type this read only command and post the result:
sudo gpt -r -vv show diskX
X is the number of the drive, if you don’t know it you can use:
diskutil listThat will list all devices and their disk number in the identifier column.
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This isn’t expected. Apple has been creating GPT partitioned disks for some time, and I know the layout is identical between OS 10.6 and 10.8.
There’s a rather obscure way this could happen if the volume you’re formatting is actually a CoreStorage logical volume. SnowLeopard predates CoreStorage so it would have no way of locating or reading that volume. But as far as I know, in the GUI the only way you get CoreStorage logical volumes is if you create an encrypted volume.
Do you have any messages in Console for the time of this “not readable” message on Snow Leopard?
In Disk Utility, clicking on a partition, then clicking Erase, preserves the partition map. Clicking on the whole drive, then clicking Partition, and changing the setting from Current to any other option (e.g. 1 Partition), and then erasing will overwrite the partition map. Which method are you using when reformatting?
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