Issues with external hard drive

[bobbyboulders]

Hi,

I have an external hard drive that I initially hooked up to my Macbook to back up a whole bunch of data, movies, files, etc. Now, I also have PC at home, and I wanted to back up a couple of files to my external hard drive. The drive isn’t being detected at all on the PC....

My friend says it’s because I installed it on my Mac first and 'formatted' it just for the Mac.... not entirely sure what that means, but is there a way I can get my PC to detect my hard drive now? I accumulated quite allot of stuff on my external HD so far and cant simply move it back to my Macbook, reformat, then move everything back....

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thank you,

 

[NintendoFan]

You formatted the drive in HFS+ which Windows can't read on it's own. You can try this program: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

 

[bobbyboulders]

thanks nintendofan. Seems like that program just might do it. Will try out the free version when i get home tonight.

Quick question. Eventually im going to figure out a way to move my data somewhere and reformat the external so that both the Mac and the PC can pick it up. Is this even Possible? I'm assuming i have to format it to NTFS?

Thanks again.

 

[blodwyn]

Quick question. Eventually im going to figure out a way to move my data somewhere and reformat the external so that both the Mac and the PC can pick it up. Is this even Possible? I'm assuming i have to format it to NTFS?

Thanks again.

Windows and OS X can both read and write to drives formatted in FAT32. This is the simplest way to go, but there are some file size limitations with FAT32 which may or may not be an issue for you. If that's a problem then you can use MacDrive on your PC to handle HFS+ disks, or use MacFuse with the NTFS module on your Mac to handle NTFS disks.

 

[SpookyLars]

When I had a PC at home, I used HFSExplorer (free). You might look at this program.