Plugging a MAC formatted USB drive into PC - Corrupt?

[Chinagraf]

Asking for a friend, had a Mac formatted USB drive sent over but wasn't told it was Mac. Plugged it into USB slot on PC, PC wouldn't read it so he unplugged it. The owner of the drive is saying my friend corrupted the drive by plugging it into a PC. Is this true? Does this happen? It smells a bit funny to me.

[jkhuri44]

sounds like cods wollop.

i've been plugging mac formatting hardrives into PCs forever. using programs like Trans Mac to read the drive...

the corruption may have been caused by other reasons, i cant think it would be simply from plugging into a PC....otherwise i would have lost a multitude of projects if that was true!

[prequalizer]

It depends on the formatting and other factors I guess. Sometimes if you use Classic OS or certain devices or hardware. You have to manually eject the Drive in the computer before physically ejecting it, if you know what I mean.

Also, you could have shorted out the drive and caused it to corrupt when ejecting it physically. I guess anything can happen. It's all electronics and data. You have to use software maybe to try and fix it. I have had drives that the headers got corrupted and I had to use software so that it can read it again.

Just a speculation.

[HA_DA_JA]

I think it has to do with it being formatted as a FAT or NTS or something like that.

[Chinagraf]

Thanks for the replies. Still smells funny to me. I've never had one corrupt that way, still it is computers so anything goes...

[HA_DA_JA]

I remember the days at the audio school. I would take my hard drive in and dodgy comptuer would not see it then I would pull it out only for a message to pop up and say the Device was not properly ejected. I woud go home to find that I could not see or use any info on the drive and that it was corrupted.
You would think I would have learnt the first time but this has happened at least 3 times in that place. The only way of safely removing the external drive was to shut the whole computer down.
I have since learnt my lessons.
Cheers

[SteveL]

I just had that problem today, plugged a seagate 320gb portable hard drive into my computer (half full of audio project backups) - all of a sudden half the file directory is missing, an error message says the disk cannot be repaired, and to back it up and re-format it. I figured the files couldn't have all just magically disappeared/been destroyed (I know, bit optimistic), so I ran Diskwarrior over it and rebuilt the directory on the external drive, and it remounted just fine with all the files back in place. Whew. Then I backed it all up onto another drive. That was a mac-formatted drive/mac pro combo. Thank you diskwarrior (but I'm pretty sure that's a mac-only app).

[musikwerks]

Not bogus at all. I've had it happen a number of times which is why all my PC's have 'MacDrive' software and all my Macs have Paragon NTFS installed.

From memory, the data is still the but the table of contents or directory is messed up so it doesn't know there's actually data there. When transporting drives between facilities I always clearly label them their capacity and format/OS. Your mate's client should have been a little more pro active and not assumed it was a PC world.

Best of luck.

[TimS]

Not bogus at all. I've had it happen a number of times which is why all my PC's have 'MacDrive' software and all my Macs have Paragon NTFS installed.

From memory, the data is still the but the table of contents or directory is messed up so it doesn't know there's actually data there. When transporting drives between facilities I always clearly label them their capacity and format/OS. Your mate's client should have been a little more pro active and not assumed it was a PC world.

Best of luck.

I'll also vouch for MacDrive - Kris put me onto it and I've never looked back - very handy piece of software.. (thanks Kris)

[heathen]

Not ejecting a usb disk properly can and will corrupt files, always eject them properly. Sometimes it does'nt seem to matter then other times it does.

[ghengis]

Just another thing to check.

I've have known at least 3 occasions that well know engineers/composers of titanic-like proportions that have plugged in a firewire connectors upside down. Lots of long days coupled with dark behind computer cable installation on hands and knees have led to this mistake. Drive is fine, computer firewire port is fine, firewire enclosure is the sacrificial lamb.

Also, running Macdrive on a PC can *sometimes* lead to problems. Running a HD system on PC I get my fair share of mac drives. Standard practice should of course be to copy the data off the drive and get it off the system as soon as possible... chances are it's your client's only copy. I think I have had an issue once when copying data back to the drive from the pc and it completely wrecked the HFS drive, but was fortunately ok once it was back on a mac.

A normal plug in of a HFS drive to the PC will not normally harm anything, unless a format was initiated or a non-safe removal has happened - which could even be screwy cable/bumped as mentioned.

There is a setting you can change on various windows systems for external hard drives and quick removal. Quick removal basically operates the drive slower as the data isn't cached on the computer side. Something to keep in mind and not necessarily relevant in this instance especially those with macs :)

cya
Ghengis

[otto ruiter]

We have a very large number of external drives where I work, and they move between Mac and PC all the time. I use the free ntfs-3g driver on all the Macs, and the drives are all formatted as NTFS. No problems!

http://www.ntfs-3g.org