Mac/PC Hard Drive formatting issues

[calebrw]

Hey guys,

I'm new to this forum and fairly inexperienced with Macs.

On Friday, I bought a brand-new 500gb SimpleTech USB hard drive to backup over 160gb pictures from my former work location.

Anyways, being pretty unfamiliar with the ways of Mac, I formatted the hard drive in the wrong format: Mac OS Extended (No Journaling). I then found out when that that didn't work, it should be in MS-DOS File System.

I went back to my former work location and reformatted (or partitioned) the drive in Disk Utility to MS-DOS File System format and I brought it home and the drive does not register as a hard drive. It registers that it's connected to the PC, but nothing else.

The drive worked fine on the Mac I formatted it on.

These are the two guides I used:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html
http://lists.apple.com/archives/scitech/2004/Sep/msg00142.html

Am I missing something?

Thanks for any help you can give,

- Caleb Williams

 

[TEG]

The drive must be formatted at FAT32 (MS-DOS File System). It is easiest to do this on the Windows Machine. You'll have to use the Administrator Tools in XP to see the drive, but it is not that hard.

TEG

 

[calebrw]

Thanks for your reply. I had a clarifying question. Unfortunately, the only copy of the pictures are on the hard drive and not at my former employer any longer, otherwise I'd reformat on the PC and then go to my ex-work and copy from the Mac. Is there a reliable method to format for PC and Mac use on a Mac?

Thanks,

 

[djtrippin]

iPartition is the best tool I have found thus far for easy formatting with support for PC filesystems.