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I have a USB drive that only had a /dev/disk1 that I could mount by mount -t hfs /dev/disk1 /Volumes/usb on a Mac drive. For the life of me I could not get it mount or be read on Windows regardless of the tools I used.
Windows decided to initialize the drive as a GPT so now I can't mount it under Mac and I see /dev/disk1 and /dev/disk1s1 is there anyway to undo what Windows did so I can access the data?
I should also mention that I did not create any partitions. I simply accessed the disk from Windows Disk Management and let Windows make it GPT thinking it would finally allow me to view the drive after all the other software I tried would not show the drive.
EDIT: So I did some more research and it looks like Apple releases APFS a new version over HFS. Could that have been why I as not able to access the USB drive at all on Windows was due to the new file system?
Jason
Posted 2016-12-07T23:16:19.280
Reputation: 3 636
I don't know how to undo what Windows has done. I believe that initializing the drive has removed the HFS filesystem, although I cannot prove that. When I want to transfer a USB drive between MS Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, I format the drive as FAT32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#FAT32
– StandardEyre – 2016-12-07T23:48:26.320To expand upon the good suggestion from @StandardEyre , I usually format my external USB drives in exFAT format. It is compatible with both Windows and OS X, but it doesn't have the 4 GB file size limitation found in FAT32. What’s the Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS?
– Run5k – 2016-12-08T00:29:53.053" I simply accessed the disk from Windows Disk Management and let Windows make it GPT thinking it would finally allow me to view the drive after all the other software I tried would not show the drive." - When you did, your what I will assume was a OS X compatible filesystem, was removed. You should be able to use OS X tools to recover the data provided you have not replaced it with anything. – Ramhound – 2016-12-08T00:32:05.583