Can't read a hard drive Mac to XP

The external HD was reformatted FAT32 on the mac. When I plug it into the PC, it doesn't show up as a drive, i.e. no volume. In device manager the Maxtor drive shows up. If I try to install it, it is already installed.

Going to the command line editor, the drive does not appear when I type "list volume"

When I go to Computer Management (local)/Storage/Disk Management, the drive is there, but no volume is assigned. When I try to add/change the volume, it is grayed out as in it won't let me assign a volume. It has nothing under file system (NTPS or FAT32). The status says Healthy (GPT Protective Partitition). It's a 60 gig drive.

Why does it have to be so hard just moving files from my Mac to my PC? The not-so-Geniuses at the Mac store said it should work fine. There the same Geniuses that can't make my e-mail work on the Mac.

Do you have the drive set up for the machine in terms of termination correctly?

Jack

What brand is your external hard drive?

I have a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition that requires the installation of some WD software to mount correctly on my Mac.

Another trick you could try:

-shutdown your PC

-connect the external drive

-power up the external drive (wait for the drive to spin up completely)

-then power up the PC

Usually, the PC will find the drive when booting up.

Take Care

George, did you recreate the partition when you reformatted, and what partition scheme did you choose? You probably want to try using Master Boot Record, and then reformatting the drive again.

Since all my computers are networked, I share files between my Macs and my PCs just using file sharing.

Good luck.

Linda

this should help NTFS for Mac

Do you have the drive set up for the machine in terms of termination correctly?

I have no idea what this means.

George, did you recreate the partition when you reformatted, and what partition scheme did you choose? You probably want to try using Master Boot Record, and then reformatting the drive again.

I created no partition when formatting on the mac. I did do a reformat with no luck.

After googling for a bit, apparently I was misinformed. I was told that if I reformatted my drives using FAT32, the PC would have no trouble reading and writing to it. This was true for one of big drives that I uses to transfer files from PC to Mac. This was not the case with my 60gb portable. I found a program, MacDisk, to transfer files. The trial version worked like a charm, although the trial version is limited to 1mb file size.

Thanks for your replies.

Have you tried formatting the drive with NTFS on the PC? It is more stable than any FAT32 partition.

Then install MacFuse+NTFS3G on OSX for read/write access to the file system. From this point on all windows drives will have full access on your Mac. I am a Mac user but find this easier as most peers use windows.

Cheers,

Simon

Is there only one partition on the drive?

Sometimes, if there is a protected 1st partition in the volume, the second (valid) partition won't show up on Windows. I've had this happen with USB drives with hidden partitions.

But in general, if you format them as FAT32, no Windows machine should have problem reading them.

A drive formatted FAT32 using Mac OS cannot be read by a PC. It requires a 3rd party software program like MacDrive to read the files. Conversely, formatting a drive FAT32 using Windows limits you to a 32gb partition.

I ended up partitioning one portable drive. I have a 32gb partition for stuff I want to transfer to the PC.

A drive formatted FAT32 using Mac OS cannot be read by a PC. It requires a 3rd party software program like MacDrive to read the files. Conversely, formatting a drive FAT32 using Windows limits you to a 32gb partition.

That's not true, George.

If you're running Vista, you should be able to format a drive on a Mac using FAT32, but you need to select Master Book Record or GUID as the partitioning scheme.

If you're on XP, you should select "Master Boot Record" as your partitioning scheme before formatting a drive on the Mac.

More info here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=635453

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx

Cool, I cannot believe I didn't find this on my searches. I've still got a big drive I need to format. This will come in handy for moving big chunks of data.

What brand is your external hard drive?

I have a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition that requires the installation of some WD software to mount correctly on my Mac.

Another trick you could try:

-shutdown your PC

-connect the external drive

-power up the external drive (wait for the drive to spin up completely)

-then power up the PC

Usually, the PC will find the drive when booting up.

I have an external hard drive that I want to use on my Mac. I don't know how to erase and reformat the hard drive from Mac OS X without buying a third party software. Is there a way within Leopard to do this? (1 answer - asked 15 months ago)

If it is the image you posted, click on Cyclops, then press erase (both in the image you posted.) There are various options, such as discussed above, to make them readable cross platform and also some things, such a Journaling or GUID (if you want to use as an Intel Boot Drive), may or may not be needed depending on what you are doing....