Help! LG Smart TV Reformatted My HDD.

[Pixual]

I was getting very annoyed with Plex yesterday when I couldn't get my LG Smart TV to connect to it (long story), so I decided to just plug my 1TB external HDD into the USB of the TV and play the movie I wanted to watch from there. It worked, no issue.

Then, I went back to my old Mac Mini that is the Plex server and plugged the HDD back in. The system refused to mount it. No errors, nothing. Just not appearing in the Finder at all. Had a look at Disk Utilities and it's there, but it can't be mounted. Looks like the file system has been changed by the LG TV's webOS. I wan't shown any messages by the TV when I plugged it in. It just mounted it and asked me to navigate to my media.

If I plug it back into the TV all the material that was on the drive is still there and accessible, but I can't use the drive anywhere else now. If I reformat it I will lose all the media as well as a lot of other data I have on there that I don't have backed up elsewhere. This is very annoying!

Is there any way of fixing this issue without reformatting the drive? I was thinking that if it was accessible on the network I could try and copy the material off there using my lan, but I don't know how to get the Mac to see that TV as a network device. Is it even possible? I don't have a PC, unfortunately so can't even try my HDD on one of those.

Help!

 

[WAslayer]

Doubt that the TV would be accessible over the network..

Also doubt the TV changed the filesystem.. If it did, it would require a reformat to do so, which means you would not be able to see the movie anymore on the TV either..

You have to try mount from the command line, look for errors preventing the disk from mounting and work from there..

 

[Pixual]

It really has done something to the disk's file allocation table. But I will try your suggestion and see if it helps.

 

[ponder]

From the command line interface what's the output from the command, diskutil list

 

[SauRoNZA]

It’s clearly not formatted since all the content is there and as I recall WebOS can’t even write to it never mind format it.

Sounds more like it isn’t/wasn’t unmounted cleanly.

What file system? exFAT?

 

[ShellySA]

Alas, the WebOS mobile app, TV plus has been integrated into yet another stupid app from LG.

LG ThinQ is the name, intended to sync all appliances, whether Media, kitchen, "fridge, washing Machine & microwave," seamlessly to Google home, apple's homekit etc.
Albeit, not supported in SA.

DLNA is unfortunately not supported by ThinkQ rendering pretty useless for LG tvs.