Accidentally changed HD format

I have a WD Elements desktop that was mounted to my iMac computer. I unplugged it and plugged it to my PC laptop (windows 10) and it was not recognized by the windows explorer so I “initialized it” in the PC, and might have accidentally changed the formatting of the drive. I believe it’s now in RAW format (unsure).

So now, my iMac can’t mount this drive (HD is recognized by the Disk Utilities but can’t mount to the Finder window to access the data). The same thing with my PC Laptop, the HD is recognized by Device Manager but can’t access the data/can’t be mounted to Windows Explorer.

The option I was given was to format it which I don’t want to do since I have so many important data inside. How to fix this issue without losing the data inside? I need to change the formatting back to be able to at least be readable by my iMac.

First, you should check the current file format and connect it to compatible OS, either MacOS or Windows, to take a backup of important data files. Then format it to MacOS file format, allows you to access data files in MacOS only. However, you can also format it to exFAT file format compatible to MacOS as well as Windows OS to read data files.

You’ve already erased all of your important data by initializing it on the PC … and making it RAW .

You didn’t change the HD format … you erased it,including all the data. A RAW drive is a hard drive partition which has not been formatted.

Hope you have a backup … otherwise the data is gone. (unless it can be recovered by data recovery software or a data recovery service)