External Harddrive problems

[ataboc]

Not sure if this is the right place but:

I just purchased a 500gb WD mybook. It's formatted with FAT32. I first plugged it into my pc (running XP) to backup my music and pictures. All went well.

Next was to backup my macbook running leopard. Time Machine needed to "erase" i'm guessing format the drive before it could begin. No problem, i'll just backup the PC again.

So here's the problem. The PC no longer recognizes the drive in Mycomputer.
The drive does show up in the device manager just not anywhere else.
I restarted the PC, un-installed and re-installed the drivers... no joy.

Should i re-format the drive with my macbook??



Cliffs: FAT32 drive works with macbook not PC.

 

[/"\/oo\/"\]

I would venture a guess that when time machine erased your drive, it also reformatted to hfs...which windows can't read or write without additional software. So, if you want to continue to use that drive for both your windows computer and time machine, install macdrive on your windows computer...it runs $50 IIRC.

 

[simie]

You could partition the drive and see if Time Machine will look at only the 1st parttion thus leaving the second partition on the drive to be formatted for Fat 32 (Windose ) access.

This may work providing that the drive is big enough in the first place.

 

[wallaby]

You could partition the drive and see if Time Machine will look at only the 1st parttion thus leaving the second partition on the drive to be formatted for Fat 32 (Windose ) access.

This may work providing that the drive is big enough in the first place.

I second this suggestion. With 500GB you should have plenty of room for a Time Machine partition and a FAT32 partition. Just use Disk Utility to make the partitions first, and see if Time Machine will take to just the HFS partition when you run it.