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Restoring an External Hard-Drive using Acronis True Image File

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Hello everyone - apologies for this mess I have created. I've come to throw myself upon your exceeding level of collective intelligence to try and find whether or not I can save my relationship.

Apologies if this is the wrong forum - I appreciate that the DiscWizard provided by SeaGate is not necessarily identical but the two seem to interlink and I presume there is some relation.

My partner has a SeaGate Backup Plus Portable Hard Drive [See Images]. She used it without issue on her Mac but recently switched to a Windows PC after the Mac broke. She wanted to use this for her new Windows PC but the hard drive was not visibile when connected to the PC via USB. She asked me to fix it. I shouldn't have risked it!

[It should be noted that we do still have access to a Mac if required for the fix.]

If you cannot tell by now I am one of those people who appears to be computer literate but really has no idea as to the complexities of this stuff. After briefly reading about file formats - my genius decision was to partition the drive with an NTFS format - only that deleted the data on the drive [with fair warning]. I was using the Seagate DiscWizard at this time but have since transitioned to the Acronis True Image 2021 software.

My one redeeming quality is that I created an Acronis True Image Backup file [See Images] before pressing the delete button - thinking that a simpleton such as myself could just restore it to this previous state if this was a bad idea. Unfortunately - I have no idea how to achieve this.

I undid the partitioning and the external hard drive was not showing up in the wizard as before so I redid the partioning in the NTFS format and attempted to use this to restore the partioning but was greeted with an error about format / resize. [See Images] I had to reverted back to the SeaGate DiscWizard at this point as it recognised the BackUp alot more easily as I was using this software when I created the backup.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

To summarise - I am struggling to restore the hard drive back to it's original state using this Image File.

I was wondering if this was indeed possible and any help would be appreciated!

Happy to provide any further inofrmation as required. Please save my relationship.

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Ben,

Mac and Windows as you have discovered use different file systems as you have discovered and that is at root of your issue. 

Is the backup you created a full disk backup or a files and folders type backup?  If the backup is a full disk backup then you should clear the entire space of the formatting you have applied to the external disk.  You can do that using Windows Disk Management to right click on the formatted area of the disk and select Delete volume.  That will make the entire disk Unallocated.  After that right click on the space that shows the Disk Number and select initialize.  In the popup box that appears just select the defaults.

Next, use the DiscWizard to restore the backup you created to the disk.  Once that is completed you would need to copy all the data off of the drive to another disk attached to a Windows PC, then you can reformat the external disk again to NTFS and then copy the data back to it.

If this is a files an folders backup then you need to do the above disk actions except use the MAC to do so.  Once the disk is prepped using the MAC then restore the backup to the disk, then copy to another disk that uses the NTFS format.  Once you have the data on another disk you can then clear the the ext. disk and format it as NTFS and copy the data to it. 

Ben, since you have the True Image backup on your PC's D: drive, have you tried to just double click on that file in Windows Explorer to see if it opens up OK and allows you to see all the files there. If so, perhaps you could just copy over the files from that to the other drive once formatted NTFS.