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Windows not seeing USB External HD

E

Edwardz

macrumors regular
Original poster
Hello

Just recently installed Vista Business on my Mac. I have a 320 GB external hard-drive, but it is not coming up anywhere on my Windows (Via USB). How do I fix this? Thanks

-cK
 
I'm not too sure what you mean. I have a MyBook 320 GB 2.0 via 2.0 USB. I connect it to vista, and I hear a little ding sound, but it's not showing up anywhere.
 
I'm having a similar problem with getting my computer to recognize a camera and microscope. I'm running boot camp and trying use software on windows to do image acquisition. I was told by the camera company that windows won't recognize hardware if it is running through boot camp. Is this true?
 
Your external HDD has to be formatted in FAT32 or NTFS for Windows to recognize it. If it is formatted in the Mac's HFS+ file system, Windows can't do anything with it.

Boot Camp should, for all intents and purposes, be no different then a Wintel PC, at least as it relates to hardware. The only real differences is Boot Camp provides a virtual BIOS for Windows, but hardware like a camera or microscope should not care about that.
 
Edwardz said:
I'm not too sure what you mean. I have a MyBook 320 GB 2.0 via 2.0 USB. I connect it to vista, and I hear a little ding sound, but it's not showing up anywhere.
Click to expand...

I'm using Leopard (10.5). If you using Tiger (10.4) I believe you will see the same things. If you are using an OS X older than 10.4 then I don't know what you will see.

Plug in your External Drive.

Go to Disk Utility (found in the Utilities folder, in Applications), and open it up. You should see a white vertical box on the left with icons that look like hard drives. One of them should say Macintosh HD. Others may start with a number (2 or 3 digits plus decimal eg 80.2 GB ST350063NS). These are the drives, volumes, etc that the Mac can see. Clicking on them won't hurt anything.

If you see an Icon called Macintosh HD, that is your internal one. Click on it, and look at what it says at the bottom of the window, at the line called "Format: " This is the line that appears under "Mount Point". It will likely say something like Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Now click on the icon that you think might be the external drive. What does it say next to the "Format" line at the bottom of the window?

Telling us that will help with the next step. Don't click on the other buttons unless you know what you are doing. Just look.

Good Luck
 
CWallace said:
Your external HDD has to be formatted in FAT32 or NTFS for Windows to recognize it. If it is formatted in the Mac's HFS+ file system, Windows can't do anything with it.

Boot Camp should, for all intents and purposes, be no different then a Wintel PC, at least as it relates to hardware. The only real differences is Boot Camp provides a virtual BIOS for Windows, but hardware like a camera or microscope should not care about that.
Click to expand...

took the words out of my mouth. it must be ntfs or fat32 to have windows see it. if you have it in hfs+, which is the default for osx, then windows will not see it
 
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