hey guys happy holidays! i recent received a Western Digital 1TB external HD for christmas. It has 2 partitions 1 for time machine backups and another just for some extra space . They are both set to Mac Os Journaled and work fine but when i connected it to my brother Windows laptop to get some music of his hard drive, it wasnt able to find the hard drive. i tried unplugging it and plugging it back in and nothing happened. any help? thanks.
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External Hard drive question
- Thread starter jordanf1end
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FAT32 (File Allocation Table)
- Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
- Maximum file size: 4GB.
- Maximum volume size: 2TB
- Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
- Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
- To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X: Install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free)
- Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx 33USD).
- Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard, but is not advisable, due to instability.
- Maximum file size: 16 TB
- Maximum volume size: 256TB
- Read/Write HFS+ from native Mac OS X
- Required for Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner backups of Mac internal hard drive.
- To Read/Write HFS+ from Windows, Install MacDrive
- To Read HFS+ (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer
- Maximum file size: 8EiB
- Maximum volume size: 8EiB
Don't forget exFAT, also known as FAT64.
- Read/write natively in Windows XP (with an optional update), Windows Vista (with Service Pack 2), Windows 7, and Mac OS X (10.6.5 or later)
- exFAT formatting should always be done with Windows, since Windows doesn't recognize Mac-formatted exFAT volumes for some odd reason
- Maximum file size: 64ZiB
- Maximum volume size: 64ZiB
I didn't forget it. Since it only works with certain versions of Mac OS X and Windows, it's not the best choice for compatibility.
That is true - you are 100% correct. I mentioned it just in case the OP was interested and had a setup compatible with it.
Wish we could get a world 'standard' on these things.. Like TCP/IP in the networking world.
Actually, the equivalent of TCP/IP is working just fine in the storage world. Connecting drives and reading raw data is virtually bulletproof regardless of system. I would rather liken the different file systems with protocols on top of the IP stack, like FTP, HTTP, Bittorrent and so on. While not a perfect analogy, it's a fair bit closer at least.
Back to topic anyways... I've on several occasions tried to decide how to handle similar situations as the OP. In order to solve it successfully, I basically had to redefine my problem.
My external drives are formatted for OS X, period.
For data exchange with other computers, I either use a network, the Internet or a decently-sized USB key formatted as FAT32. While the latter constitutes another piece of hardware to purchase, I found it worth every penny. I'm not comfortable with other people messing with my drives anyway.