[ph0ust]

hi all. i have a maxtor one touch 2 firewire/usb external hard drive that i set up on my mac. now, i am trying to plug it into my windows notebook's usb connection and the windows machine does not recognize it at all. is there some issue with using it on a windows machine after setting it up on my mac first? i thought that it was interchangable as a mass storage device between the two operating systems. thanks for any help.

[mduell]

Did you partition it as HFS+ (the Mac proprietary format) or FAT32 (the cross-platform format)?

If you did HFS+, there are a variety of low-cost utilities for Windows that will let you access it. Or you could reformat it as FAT32 (copy your data somewhere else first).

[larrinski]

Is there any Windows programs you know off hand (and are perhaps free!). I was just about to post a new topic about the same problem. I have all my music backed up on a 40Gb Hd that was formatted with HFS+. I lent my brother inlaw the external to copy all the music to his Windows machine... but of course I forgot about the formatting issue. He can't see it. I think I have heard of Macdrive, but free is better! Cheers.

[MacBook91]

go on maxtor.com or their homepage, go to downloads and try to find the FAT32 formatting thingy and try getting it. It will reformat your drive so try to back up your backup, if possible

[Tuoder]

i am not aware of anything free that will do what you ask. I know stuff that aint all that expensive, but that is it.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by MacBook91

go on maxtor.com or their homepage, go to downloads and try to find the FAT32 formatting thingy and try getting it. It will reformat your drive so try to back up your backup, if possible

Totally unnecessary. Both Windows and Mac OS X are capable of reformatting into FAT32. But of course that requires backing up the disk first.

tooki

[ph0ust]

thanks everyone. the last thing i ever plan to do is format something for windows. downloaded mac drive 6.0 and that worked like a charm. great product.