External hard drive won't show up in OS X

[itsthatguy1991]

My friend has an external hard drive, and he uses it on his Mac, OS X. Well tonight we plugged the hard drive into my PC with Windows 7, and someone told us we would have to initialize the hard drive on my PC for me to access the files. Well I did, and I couldn't access the files on my PC, so we gave up and plugged it back into his Mac.

Now his Mac won't let him access his files. In the Utility Disk, the hard drive shows up, but it won't show up in the Finder. In the Utility Disk, all the buttons such as Repair Disk, Verify Disk, etc... are greyed out and we are unable to click them. This hard drive was working just fine before we clicked Initialize on my PC. And on his Mac, its showing that his files are still there in the Utility Disk, but the Finder isn't even listing the hard drive.

This hard drive contains data that we absolutely cannot lose. We finally finished filming an entire film, and all of the videos are on this hard drive, so we can't afford to lose this data. Is there any way of making these files accessible again. Even if we can't get them from his Mac, I'd be content with getting them all onto my PC so we at least know they're safe somewhere.

Thank you in advance!

[nitesh mehta]

Well, I think that if windows can see your drive it must be fat32 or ntfs unless you have HFS for windows by Paragon or media4's Mac Drive software installed on your windows machine. If it is a windows FS partition, repair it using windows repair utility, then most likely you can see again when you hook it back up to your Mac.

[itsthatguy1991]

Thanks for the advice! I will definitely try that as soon as I have the opportunity.

Just to clarify, running the windows repair utility will not delete any data from the hard drive?

[Shikhar]

Just to clarify, running the windows repair utility will not delete any data from the hard drive?

Nope, windows repair utility will just repair your system files and registry. It will also change the settings of your user account but will not touch any data store apart from your system partition. But still, take backup and save it anywahere safe.