Help! HFS formatted partition now show up as "APFS Physical store"

[yeh7926]

I have a SSD drive previously formatted as APFS in a High Sierra machine. I needed to move some files off my MBP which is running Sierra, so took the SSD drive, put it into an external enclosure, and reformatted it as HFS under the Sierra machine. There didn't seem to have any issues as I was able to move quite a bit of data onto it. But later when I try to re-connect it, the partition does not show up in the Sierra machine... what I realized is that in the system report, it mentions "APPLE_APFS" which was odd, so I looked up about AFPS and it seemed it was a bad idea trying to reformat the APFS formatted drive back to HFS in pre-High Sierra machine...

Now when I plug the SSD into a High Sierra machine, it shows up as "USB External APFS Physical Store" and I can't mount it to access the data...

Any idea if and how I can fix this?

 

[Fishrrman]

1. First, make sure there is nothing on the drive you can't lose (we're going to erase it)

2. Take the drive to the High Sierra Mac

3. Open Disk Utility. Toward the upper left corner, there may be a popup menu. Do you see it?

4. If you do, choose "show all devices".

5. Now, you need to select the "topmost" representation for your external drive -- that is, "the physical drive itself".

6. If you can do this, NOW choose "erase" and "Mac OS extended with journaling enabled".

Does this work?

 

[yeh7926]

1. First, make sure there is nothing on the drive you can't lose (we're going to erase it)

2. Take the drive to the High Sierra Mac

3. Open Disk Utility. Toward the upper left corner, there may be a popup menu. Do you see it?

4. If you do, choose "show all devices".

5. Now, you need to select the "topmost" representation for your external drive -- that is, "the physical drive itself".

6. If you can do this, NOW choose "erase" and "Mac OS extended with journaling enabled".

Does this work?

To be clear I'm trying to recover the data that's already on the drive. Thanks anyways!