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Why does my external hard drive say no media?

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asell87
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 - Apr 14, 2016 at 08:45 AM
R2D2_WD
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 - Apr 15, 2016 at 02:56 AM
Hi all,

I have an iomega external hard drive that I originally used for class and it was formatted to work on the mac desktops in my school computer lab. I also used it at home on my personal mac laptop and the last time that I checked, there was a bunch of media on it (mostly pictures). My mac laptop isn't working right now so I'm using an old sony vaio computer since I have no other choice. It runs windows 7. When I plug in the external hard drive with the usb cord, the light on the drive turns on and I hear a noise which I assume means that it's running. However, when I look in disk management it says that the drive has no media. It also won't let me open the drive at all. Is this because it has to be reformatted for a windows computer or is there something else wrong? Also, if I reformat, will I lose my media? Should I just wait until I fix my mac and then retrieve my media through there instead? I just really hope that I didn't lose all of my stuff!

Thanks a lot for reading.

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R2D2_WD
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Apr 14, 2016 at 09:47 AM
Hi Asell87,

It is possible that you may need to reformat the drive in order to be used with one of the Windows formats. Do you know what file format it used to have when you were using it on the Mac? Sadly, if you format the drive you will lose all the data stored on it. I think you should wait ant test the drive back on the Mac laptop. Just in case, try using the drive with another USB cable.
If the external is not recognized or the data cannot be accessed even on the Mac, then you may need to try using some data recovery tools in order to save the information. Have in mind that in many cases the No Media error is an indication for a hard drive failure. I would try accessing the files with a Linux Live version, which can be freely downloaded. Make a bootable USB and boot from it. Connect the drive and try to access the data.

Hope this helps

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asell87
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Apr 14, 2016 at 10:18 AM
Thanks a bunch for responding.

I just double checked and I guess that I made a mistake. When I plug in my hard drive, it actually doesn't say no media... that is listed above it and I guess it applies to something else... what it does say is this...

Disk 2
Basic
232.89 GB
Online

200 MB
Healthy (EFI System Partition)

232.57 GB
Healthy (Primary Partition)

128 MB
Unallocated
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R2D2_WD
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 151 > asell87
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Apr 15, 2016 at 02:56 AM
It will be great if you can attach a screenshot from Disk Management. Anyways, this is really looking like a file format problem. It seems that Windows simply cannot read it and hopefully it is because of the OS type and not because of a hard drive failure. Like I told you before, you have the option, wait until you check the drive on your Mac. If the issue persist, you can write me a message and we will start thinking another ways to deal with this.
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