hi friends - I have a drive mystery, trying to solve for a professional friend. It appears simple on the surface but there are complications.
It is a Iomega typical 500GB external drive. It has a valid HFS partition of ~490GB, 141GB of that 'used', which checks out Healthy in Disk Utility health check.
Browsing the drive is easy: But there's nothing there. No file other than one I just dropped in it to make sure R/W functions well. It does..
According to the owner/user, the drive had "a lot of files" on it. I have used test disk and DMDE to see if there are chunks of data recoverable, and that appears to be the case, but my lack of expertise leaves me not sure if the recovery is finding them *in* the HFS partition or hidden/trashed in the background from a former format that was clobbered when someone mounted it on a Mac.
But strictly from the Apple side of the fence, how do I "interrogate" to find out why it is showing 141GB of data - what is the data? etc?
To say it again: from all the "normal" ways of using the drive on a Mac, it works... its just only letting one use a portion of its overall capacity.
I need your advice please
It is a Iomega typical 500GB external drive. It has a valid HFS partition of ~490GB, 141GB of that 'used', which checks out Healthy in Disk Utility health check.
Browsing the drive is easy: But there's nothing there. No file other than one I just dropped in it to make sure R/W functions well. It does..
According to the owner/user, the drive had "a lot of files" on it. I have used test disk and DMDE to see if there are chunks of data recoverable, and that appears to be the case, but my lack of expertise leaves me not sure if the recovery is finding them *in* the HFS partition or hidden/trashed in the background from a former format that was clobbered when someone mounted it on a Mac.
But strictly from the Apple side of the fence, how do I "interrogate" to find out why it is showing 141GB of data - what is the data? etc?
To say it again: from all the "normal" ways of using the drive on a Mac, it works... its just only letting one use a portion of its overall capacity.
I need your advice please