restoring hard drive back from time machine

[floorless88]

Hi
I used my seagate 500GB portable hard drive to use the Mac time machine and it said that the hard drive needed to be reformatted so i did.
But i didn't realize i then couldn't use it as a normal hard drive. So i then plugged it in to my windows pc and it doesn't open but does register in the bottom tab that the USB in plugged in and says it is working properly. I cant use it for open any file on my PC or no auto run.

How do now stop it as a time machine hard drive and use as a normal hard drive??? And get rid of time machine from the hard drive altogether ??

 

[scaredpoet]

The problem is that in order to use a hard drive for Time Machine, the drive has to be formatted with the HFS+ file system, which is Mac specific.

To be able to use the hard drive on both your mac and PC, the hard drive needs to be reformatted as FAT32. Here's how to do it in OS X. Be sure to back up any data you don't want to lose before doing this.

Once you do this, you'll be able to read and write to the drive from both machines. Time Machine will also be wiped out.