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Partition external hard drive mac greyed out windows#
Usually, OSX can see both WIN and MAC partitions as separate drives, and Windows only see the WIN partition. One is for Windows (that I use with Bootcamp on my mac), the other is for OSX (APFS file system). I hope this blog helped you resolve the greyed-out problem of your external hard drive. I have a WD Elements 1.5Tb external hard drive with two partitions. A new partition scheme will bring your external hard drive back to life. If you have backed up the data, you can go on with "y" - your disk partitions will be merged. Yes, once you have recovered the files using Stellar Data Recovery software, you can erase the greyed-out external hard drive with a new partition scheme. If it can't because the disk has no resizable data format, it will give a warning message: The chosen disk does not support resizing.Ĭaution! If you enter "y", your data on will be deleted. However, if Mac has been only logged out rather than shut down, then at Login the drive is detected but not mounted (you can see it listed in Disk Utility but greyed out). The first disk is the only one that diskutil tries to preserve the data for. If you want to use the "MacBackup3", you would then enter: diskutil mergePartitions JHFS+ MyMedia disk3s1 disk3s2 Merge the two disk partitions by "mergePartitions ". In the IDENTIFIER column, get the disk identifiers for both disks, here: disk3s1 and disk3s2 The hard drives were given to me by someone else and I can't see them anywhere except on device manager / Disk management. After this it should load and you should see that your partition button is no longer greyed out.
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I can't get any of the files off of them. Input the following into terminal on Mac (Search 'terminal'): Copy & Paste: diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ Test /dev/disk3. Only the unallocated partitions are able to be formatted or assigned a letter. This returns something like #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIERĠ: FDisk_partition_scheme *320.1 GB disk3ġ: DOS_FAT_32 MULTIMEDIA 160.0 GB disk3s1Ģ: Apple_HFS TIMEMACHINE 160.0 GB disk3s2 All option are greyed out except Delete volume and help. Choose any of the two disk names, like: diskutil list MacBackup Double left-click on the Mac HD, the internal Mac hard drive visible on the top-right corner of the desktop screen. Get the disk identifier for both disks you want to merge by "diskutil list ". To partition and format the drive with Disk Utility, follow these steps: 1.
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To elaborate the answer by this is what you must do step-by-step:
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