External Casing for Mac Hard Drive?

[InIn14]

Okay...so my iBook G4 just recently died on me. I took out the hard drive (60 GB) and bought an external casing to plug it into (2.5). Unfortunately, my other computer is a Windows computer, and when I plugged the hard drive into it to retrieve my files, nothing showed up. I know it is working, however, because I can hear the hard drive spinning and the light on the casing lights up when I plug it into the computer.

The instruction booklet for the casing said that if this sort of a problem happens, I will need to format/partition the hard drive, which I don't want to do for obvious reasons. Is it not working because of something wrong with the hard drive or because it is formatted for Mac computers and not Windows one? Would it work if I tried plugging it into a friend's mac?

 

[ThirteenXIII]

my recommendations would be something along the lines of the following;
try macdrive; ive tried for a while its not too bad for a temporary solution to transfer something from a mac formatted drive.

it will be able to read/write or just read from the mac drive to your windows drive.


or if you can use a friends mac, you can try one of two options;

transfer the files from the drive to the friends mac, or to another external drive?
then you can plug your friends mac into your pc and boot their mac into firewire target disk mode.

or plug your drive into the mac then into your pc and targetdisk mode that way.

 

[CanadaRAM]

The primary problem is that your hard drive is formatted with HFS+, which a Windows machine cannot read, unless you buy the commercial program Macdrive (as mentioned ^) -- Versiontracker does not list any shareware alternatives.

So the options are - plug it into a Mac or buy MacDrive.