Are they dead yet? (HDDs)
January 26, 2018 5:13 PM Subscribe
So I have a Sabrent HDD dock. It plugs into a USB port, and you drop hard disks into it to access them. I also have some drives that were in a NAS, that, when I drop them in the dock, whether it's attached to my MacBook or my Win10 desktop, spin up and then... nothing happens. Nothings mounts. I don't get a "do you want to format the disk?" prompt.
So! Are the drives just expensive puzzle boxes with neat fridge magnets in them? Or is there some way to format and use them again? What is going on? Not finding anything remotely helpful in google yet.
So! Are the drives just expensive puzzle boxes with neat fridge magnets in them? Or is there some way to format and use them again? What is going on? Not finding anything remotely helpful in google yet.
They're probably formatted with a different filesystem, linux may have better luck since it supports many and most nas are Linux or bad derived. However in a nas they were probably in multiple drive raid and I don't have any idea how to help you there.
You could try a Linux livecd (Ubuntu or fedora) and see if they can make heads or tails of the Nas drives, you shouldn't need to install Linux just a live cd, or live USB stick.
You can reuse them by formatting in windows or Mac,but you'll lose any info on them, and I don't know of any Mac & windows cross O's compatible filesystem.
posted by TheAdamist at 5:27 PM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
You could try a Linux livecd (Ubuntu or fedora) and see if they can make heads or tails of the Nas drives, you shouldn't need to install Linux just a live cd, or live USB stick.
You can reuse them by formatting in windows or Mac,but you'll lose any info on them, and I don't know of any Mac & windows cross O's compatible filesystem.
posted by TheAdamist at 5:27 PM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: I'll try disk utility tomorrow. Not worried about any files, the NAS was migrated. Just curious why I'm not getting the usual "I see a disk but don't see a format I know. Want me to format it?" prompt I expect, either in Windows or MacOS. Thanks!
posted by Wilbefort at 7:02 PM on January 26, 2018
posted by Wilbefort at 7:02 PM on January 26, 2018
check 'disk management' in windows too. if nothing shows in mac, don't just automatically format it until you've checked windows (or vice-versa if you check windows first).
i've had plenty of windows external drives that for some reason were just waiting for me to assign a drive letter in disk management (although not in a few years).
posted by noloveforned at 7:20 PM on January 26, 2018
i've had plenty of windows external drives that for some reason were just waiting for me to assign a drive letter in disk management (although not in a few years).
posted by noloveforned at 7:20 PM on January 26, 2018
Best answer: NAS drives are sometimes setup in a RAID configuration, where the “drive” spans a couple of disks to provide speed or redundancy. If this is the case, some tools will refuse to mount them without some cajoling.
posted by advicepig at 7:51 PM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by advicepig at 7:51 PM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
exFAT works for both Windows and MacOS.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 1:00 AM on January 27, 2018
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 1:00 AM on January 27, 2018
Best answer: macos makes you go to disk utility to format disks that were part of a raid. makes sense if you think about it. when you insert one it is waiting for the others to be inserted to mount them. it wouldn’t do to have you for at one if the others were missing.
posted by n9 at 7:33 AM on January 27, 2018
posted by n9 at 7:33 AM on January 27, 2018
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by dttocs at 5:26 PM on January 26, 2018