My Macbook is driving me crazy – or the case of the missing pocket drive

Original image : sr trends

For the second time in a year my MacBook has lost access to my pocket drive. The first one disappeared off the desktop and from the Disk Utility about 6 months after I got it last year. All my precious back ups. Gone. I couldn’t retrieve anything, I couldn’t get the drive to be recognised anywhere. The technicians couldn’t find anything to help. The shop tried and ended up giving me a new pocket drive . I got a different brand thinking that was the problem. So about a year down the track my MacBook made my pocket drive vanish again. Not on the desktop , not in Finder but there it was in Disk Utility – with the partition greyed out. No repairing , restoring, verifying, terminal fancy steps – nothing – would allow me to fix or get access to the drive. It had changed permissions for some files. How do I know? I put my pocket drive on Linux Mint which could read it. Oh thank heavens! I could back up about three-quarters of the files. The MacBook backups for Time Machine could not be backed up and some other files could not be accessed so I could copy them. Disk Utility in Linux would not reformat the drive. What now? I connected it to Windows 8, opened the Disk Manager and deleted the partition my MacBook wouldn’t read. I then reconnected it to my MacBook and reformatted it with two partitions in the hope it would not lose both of them! I now have a backed up MacBook and have saved some critical files and it all appears to be working fine. It’s got something to do with permissions and when the MacBook changes those then the pocket drive can become inaccessible. I now have to have back up of back up. Cloud is not an option because I keep getting internet outages either to do with the NBN roll out or the transport infrastructure changes.

This pocket drive wasn’t recognised by my MacBook when I first bought it. I have to use a hub to get my MacBook to see it. It is not a problem on any other computer OS. It connects directly to the USB slot. That might help those of you who are trying to get your MacBook to see the pocket drive. If it’s new you also have to remember to use Disk Utility to format it to Mac. That is very quick and easy.

I am hoping my pocket drive will now be reliable on the Mac. Fingers crossed.