Can't get footage off external drive

I have a WD usb3 drive that a studio said they reformatted to exfat so it could be used on PC's as well. They said they could not transfer all of the footage due to it being formatted for Mac. Now my drive won't mount to my Mac at all. I can see it I'm disk utility but nothing happening when I hit mount. If I repair the disk will I delete everything off the drive? Besides finding a PC to transfer the files to does anyone have any good ideas?

Repair Disk will not erase any data. A Mac should read an ExFat drive just fine, normally. Unless they did some fancy formatting trick to it.

Thanks, I wanted to be sure before I tried. I don't know what they did to this drive, because I've tried it on 3 different PC's as well and nothing will mount it.

If even a PC won't mount it, I'd suspect the drive is going bad.

Does it click (click of death) when you try to mount it? If not, and you're lucky, the controller went bad. Try to get your hands on a SATA > USB adaptor and crack open the housing to connect the drive to the computer directly.

If it is a single drive enclosure, yes, that may work, as the enclosure is only power circuitry and data bus circuitry. If the bus or power is bad, that would work.

Clicking is only one of many symptoms of a physically bad drive. Just because it isn't making noise, doesn't necessarily mean the drive isn't physically bad. But no noise is a better sign than noise (grinding, clicking, humming, vibrating). But if it is a directory that's gotten too corrupted, bad motor, bad read/write head, surface damage, none of which will make a noise, bad drive controller card, well...

If it is a multiple drive enclose, that's a RAID system, and if the RAID controller is bad, you're hosed.

If this is the client's drive, if they formatted it and put the data on it, I'd send it back to the client right away, tell them it won't work with a number of Macs and PCs, let them be responsible for their own data. If you start to toy around too much with a client's drive, you could inherit some liability you don't need to have.

"They said they could not transfer all of the footage due to it being formatted for Mac."

That statement tells me they're not really that tech savvy. The drive either fits the data, or it doesn't. ExFat or HFS or any other format will not change the capacity of a drive that drastically. Just something to bear in mind.

If they need it to be read by PCs, that's one thing. But to also state it wouldn't hold all the data because of a format, no, I don't buy it.

I'm going with a bad format, or drive just wasn't stable to start with. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Hey Rob,
Not clear here if this was your own drive, formatted to Mac with files on it, then you sent it to client and they reformatted without your knowledge? If so, I might get a little mad.
Sounds like it can be a bad formatting issue. If it won't mount at all, then I would use a disk recovery program on it. Disk Warrior maybe.
If it is the clients drive, like Ben said send it back, don't take responsibility if you don't have too.
Hopefully, there exists back-ups of all the files somewhere.
While Macs can read/write to EXFAT/FAT/NTFS the opposite is not true for PCs reading Mac. Having said this, it is always better to work off a GUID formatted drive in FCPX/Mac. I'd ask for the files and then copy onto a GUID drive prior to editing. Just me looking to eliminate one source of problems before investing time in a project.

Hope this helps, Greg

Hey guys, so I re-formatted the drive last night before I saw some of these suggestions. Good news is the drive works fine, bad news it obviously all the footage has been deleted. I tried to do a "repair" in disk utility, but I got a message saying the drive needed to be re-formatted.

The drive was mine to begin with, somehow they didn't have any portable drives.... seems odd. They must of done something weird/incorrect when formatting because it works fine for me now that I formatted it back to the way I had it before I sent it out to them. I explained everything I tried and informed the studio they need to send me a drive with the footage.

Unfortunately I can't just walk away from the jobs...need the money. Though these people are not the greatest to work with. They had my drive for a month making excuses about why they didn't send it out. Coupled with the formatting mess they gave me, it was all a waste of time and don't want to re-send them my drive as I'd bet it will just be the same circle of issues.

I did create a disk image, though I couldn't see anything because I couldn't mount it before reformatting so I doubt anything will be in the image.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

If it is your drive, format it yourself as ExFat with Disk Utility, then send it to them. At least you'll know the formatting is correct. I'd even put a tiny ReadMe .txt doc on it stating when the drive was formatted, and to ExFat. See if that file is still there when you get it back. If not, they probably reformatted it. I mean, who'd trash a 2k .txt file?

That's exactly what I did and I just sent the drive back out. Hopefully it comes back in working condition this time!