External Hard drive not recognised by new Laptop (windows 7)

RebelRebel

Hi,

I have an Iomega 500gb USB external hard drive that i used as a back up for my music and photos. I transferred these from my old laptop which was a Mac powerbook running OS X 10.3.9. I also partitioned the drive in two. My new laptop is a PC running windows 7 (64 bit) and it does not recognise the laptop - it does not show up in the "Computer".

When i go to computer and right click and go to computer management and then open storage and disk management the external drive is not showing at the top of the screen with the other drives It does show up in the lower half of the screen as Disk 1. it says "online" and then says 465 GB unallocated, with a black line across the top. If I right click on Disk 1 i only get the following options:

Convert to Dynamic disk
Convert to GPT disk
Properties
Help.

I don't know what these first two options are so I'm reluctant to try as I don't want to lose anything that I have on the external hard drive.

Any suggestions please. I'm not very computer savvy so bear with me!

Many thanks for any advice,
RR

yoyo

RebelRebel wrote: »

Hi,

I have an Iomega 500gb USB external hard drive that i used as a back up for my music and photos. I transferred these from my old laptop which was a Mac powerbook running OS X 10.3.9. I also partitioned the drive in two. My new laptop is a PC running windows 7 (64 bit) and it does not recognise the laptop - it does not show up in the "Computer".

When i go to computer and right click and go to computer management and then open storage and disk management the external drive is not showing at the top of the screen with the other drives It does show up in the lower half of the screen as Disk 1. it says "online" and then says 465 GB unallocated, with a black line across the top. If I right click on Disk 1 i only get the following options:

Convert to Dynamic disk
Convert to GPT disk
Properties
Help.

I don't know what these first two options are so I'm reluctant to try as I don't want to lose anything that I have on the external hard drive.

Any suggestions please. I'm not very computer savvy so bear with me!

Many thanks for any advice,
RR

Did you format it on the mac? If you did you probably chose a Mac file system HFS I think which windows won't read, You will need to format it (back up everything on it prior as this will erase it) to something like FAT32 which is more limited but both windows & mac will be able to read it, I think there are HFS drivers out there for windows, may allow you to read the disk, am not entirely sure though

Nick

leeroybrown

The external disk will have a GPT partition table and a HFS+ filesystem. Windows won't be able to handle either of these. It'll need to have an MBR partition table and a FAT32 filesystem to be fully read/write compatible with both laptops.

RebelRebel

Thanks for the replies. Yea I prob formatted it for mac alright. Ok so i'll have to see if I can reformat the drive to be read by both windoes and mac, but i'll have to save the stuff on the hard drive elsewhere first.

I have some large music files on the external hard drive (from studio recordings) which are only on the hard drive so i'll have to the transfer them somewhere else first before i reformat the drive.

hmmm... why are these things ever easy!

Thanks for the help again.

leeroybrown

A few other things to note:

1) If you've any files over 4GB in size you won't be able to store them on FAT32.

2) You can safely read NTFS partitions from a Mac but you probably won't want to enable write support.

3) I think there is some software available that allows you to access a Mac formatted disk from your PC.

RebelRebel

Thanks again for that. It might be just easier to get a new external hard drive and set it up for both mac and PC. and just keep the one I have for the mac.

leeroybrown

If both laptops are on the same network another possible solution would be to setup Windows file sharing on the Mac to access what you need on the external disk. You can find it under Sharing in System Preferences.

RebelRebel

Thanks Leeroy, The laptops are not currently on a network at all. Maybe that's something that I can set up though. I'll look into it. Thanks for the suggestion.