Memory hard drive.

[thearchitect]

Hey all, I was just wondering, I recently bought an external hard drive (memory 500gb). I plugged it into my mac, and that works great. I then proceeded to plug it into my PC, and nothing appeared! The computer recognized it the first time as it said so, but even then it did not show up in my computer, or any time I tried after to get it to work. So, am I missing a trick? Does it suddenly just become compatible to the immediate computer you connect it to????? thanks.

[Ethel]

I don't know much about Macs but have found this which seems to address your problem:

http://tinyurl.com/378xsd

[thearchitect]

cool, thanks ethel, that looks great.

[fo3nix]

What format is the drive in (essentially what that article is saying).

Macs use HFS+ by default, which Windows won't even show.

NTFS (what Windows usually uses) can be read by both, and written by Macs too with a bit of effort.

FAT32 drives can be read and written by both systems.

You can format the drive on either your Mac or Windows PC. Either way, note that you'll lose all your data on it, so beware.

[thearchitect]

are you saying that I can only stick to one of those formats, and will constantly be loosing data (it's brand new, so I don't have much on it). Or are you saying I should choose to use NTFS which can be read and written by both my systems, even with a little trouble.

[ACtheTROLL]

wasn't the drive formatted when you got it?

I think it's still true to say that just about all (external) drives are formatted using fat32 - it's about as universal as you can get

try swiss knife
http://www.compuapps.com/Download/swissknife/s wissknife.htm

its a windows prog - will create fat32<32gb

[fo3nix]

Sorry I wasn't clear enough.

Use FAT32.

Format it once, now.

Then you can freely plug it into any system and it'll work. All your data.