Formatting windows hard drive

Hi there,

I connected an ExFAT formatted external HDD that I routinely use to store applications installers (both Windows and Mac, and bigger than 4GB, hence choosing ExFAT since NTFS is read-only) to a Windows 7 virtual machine on my Mac. This drive has seen OS X commonly reporting an error and refusing to mount it, unless I manually checked it in Disk Utility. This checking failed, of course, but it seems to be a known issue of ExFAT on the Mac.

Now, for some reason, Windows sees it as unformatted, as for Mac OS X, it is unreadable.

Given the short time it was connected to Windows and that the disk was mostly idle, I am pretty sure a glitch happened in the virtual machine and the data is still there, and only "something" in the partition header has failed. Where should I go to ask this question that seems to be Windows-specific? Is there a way, say, with a Mac software, to switch the drive back to its original state?

 

Well it's sort of solved, in the sense that I did found aWindows software to extract data, but losing all original hierarchy, instead using its own, senseless (to me) one, cutting files and corrupting others. The software doesn't seem to test what is functional, and what is not. As I stated, the disk is seen as unformatted by Windows, there's no way I could back anything up from it. And it has absolutely nothing to do with formatting, being precisely an operation that MUST NOT be performed in state. And FAT32 won't hold 4GB+ files.

Sure there are TONS of Windows-oriented forums, but I'd like to go where acneic 13-yrs old trolls don't hang. They seem to be especially common on Windows forums. That's why I came here for advice.

 

Indeed. Notably, the drive would indicate it's unable to mount due to errors, then mount just fine. This is a known problem with ExFAT drives on OS X. But it's not like there was an alternative to store 4GB+ files on a cross-platform-readable drive.