My Seagate External HD won't work on both Mac and PC, is it possible to make it so!

[mikeromeo18]

I had used my Seagate HD on my laptop PC for music recording but switched to using it on my MAC. now I want to throw a large .dmg file on the HD from my pc to get it on my MAC, but when I plug it into my PC nothing happens at all? Is it possible to use it on both computers in order to transfer files?

thanks for your time

 

[Metuas]

Do you know the filesystem? If you reformatted it to HFS+, you'll need a program (MacDrive) for read/write on PC.
Is your PC being stupid and throwing out the USB Mass Storage driver (My dad's does that some times, for reasons which escape me...)?
Are you sure it's not corrupt? Does it work on at least one computer?

That's all I've got.

 

[ab2650]

It may be helpful (especially if you don't know) to post some details about what Disk Utility (on OS X) and Disk Management (Win XP) report about the drive, even if it's not mounting.

Disk Utility can be found in /Applications/Utilities/. Once launched, on the left is a display of connected hardware and associated partitions. I'd be curious to know what "Format" the partition you're using is reporting... NTFS, FAT32, Mac OS Extended.

On Win XP, you can launch Disk Management by right clicking My Computer and selecting "Manage." Then choose Disk Management on the left. The right pane will show connected devices and partitions to those devices if they are mounted. It should also show the partition type (FAT or NTFS) as well.

For the record, is the drive still working fine under OS X? If it mounts there and not in Windows there is a pretty good chance you're using HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) that is not natively compatible with Windows. If you have an opportunity to backup and reformat the drive, choosing to format in "MS-DOS (FAT)" will be your best cross-platform option; Read/write access is native to OS X, Windows and Linux with FAT.

 

[mikeromeo18]

Thanks for the reply, yes I do believe I reformatted the drive to the MAC standard, b/c I used a disc to install the HD, also all my music files that I made from my pc show up as errors on my sequencer on the mac. Probably need to format it to FAT32.

Mainly I just need this one large .dmg file to be transfered to my mac, any ideas on how to do so?

 

[spinnerlys]

Or you could install HFS Explorer on Windows to access HFS formatted drives.
It's free.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Thanks for the reply, yes I do believe I reformatted the drive to the MAC standard, b/c I used a disc to install the HD, also all my music files that I made from my pc show up as errors on my sequencer on the mac. Probably need to format it to FAT32.

Mainly I just need this one large .dmg file to be transfered to my mac, any ideas on how to do so?

How big is the .dmg file? If is is greater than 4Gb, the FAT32 format will not help due to a limitation in the format.

Perhaps transferring it via a memory stick would be simplest, but again the filesize is the question.

Burning it to a Mac+PC compatible data DVD with Toast is another option (with a Double Layer disk giving you over 7Gb to use...).