Disk No Longer Reading after plugging into Windows

I have a WD Elements disk that was formatted for MacOS (didn't realize it) and when I took it home and tried to plug it into a Windows PC, it acted like the drive was bad. When I brought it back to work and plugged it in, the Disk Utility told me to initialize the disk. I do not want to lose the data that I JUST saw on the disk but now MacOS will not read it.

This is similar to Initalizing a disk to make it readable - Apple Community

and I tried the two software recommendations and neither got me anywhere to be able to read the disk.


Is there anyway to read the disk? I can see it in DriveDx and all is healthy, but because I believe it wasn't formatted in EXT, the MacFUSE software didn't help either.


Any suggestions?

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jun 4, 2025 03:32 PM

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Posted on Jun 4, 2025 05:18 PM

OK, you either need to provide more detail or clarify what you did:

  1. Formatted for macOS means either APFS or HFS+.
  2. What happened between Windows "acted like the drive was bad" and "when I brought it back to work"? Windows will usually bring up a dialog asking if you want to format a disk it can't read...did you accidentally format the disk?
  3. If Disk Utility is asking you to format a disk, it can't recognize the file system - macOS recognizes and can read Windows NTFS and can both read and write FAT.
  4. EXT refers to a family of Linux file systems.
  5. MacFUSE is just a driver framework for user-space file systems - there still need to be file system drivers in the framework. The most popular ones are for NTFS...but what ones are you using? It's also old and unmaintained...what were you trying to do with MacFUSE - especially if it "didn't help"?


In other words, what did you actually do to this disk - because Windows can't usually format a disk to a filesystem macOS can't at least read.

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Jun 12, 2025 07:07 PM in response to trails247

FYI, I did find the Terminal command which would try replacing the current partition table with the backup partition table. Depending on what caused the change in the partitions, this could restore the partition table to the previous layout, or the backup partition table is identical to the current layout.


I would not use this command until you have finished recovering your data just to be safe since I don't know if it will cause any problems with the data recovery software if it is already midway through a scan/restore.


If you want to try replacing the current partition table with the backup partition table, then you first need to get the device identifier for the external drive. You can get this device identifier from Disk Utility. It will be in the form of "diskX" where "X" is a number such as "disk7" as in the command line pictures you last posted. Keep in mind you need to retrieve this device identifier just before using any of the command since the device identifier can change every time you connect the drive.


Once you have the correct device identifier for the "broken" drive, you can use the following Terminal command to replace the current partition table with the backup copy of the partition table (replace "diskX" with the correct device identifier for the "broken" drive):

sudo  gpt  recover  diskX


This command will prompt you for your admin password. Nothing will appear on the screen as you type the password. You will need to press the "Return" key to submit the password.


If the command doesn't produce any errors, then eject the drive and reconnect it so it will pick up the other partition table.

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Disk No Longer Reading after plugging into Windows

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