USB hard drive in mac... Now the pc won't recognize it.

[fortheloveofdog]

Hello there. A friend of mine has the following hard drive:

WD Extreme™ Lighted Combo
WDXC2500JB
External Hard Drives
250 GB, Dual Interface

It was working fine with his windows installation (XP Home), but he went round to a friend's house and plugged it into a mac to get some files and when he plugged it back into his PC, it couldn't be found by Windows.

Is this something that happens often? I only ask as he's under the impression that the mac 'did something' to it. Is this possible?

He asked me for help and I really have no idea what to suggest. It still turns on and whirrs reassuringly, so I'm wondering if there's something very simple that we have overlooked. Having read some of the threads regarding these hard drives on this site, I was thinking of trying as scandisk on it, but seeing as it isn't recognized, I'm not sure that there's any way of sorting this out.

Has anyone got any suggestions? I'd be most grateful.

Thanks. :)

[BipolarBill]

If the Mac was able to read the drive, that means that it's formatted with FAT32. Macs can read FAT32, but not NTFS.

I really doubt that the Mac did anything to the drive. Either the drive was damaged, died or Windows is being catty.

Test the drive on another PC to verify that it works. You also need to look in Disk Management (DISKMGMT.MSC). Disk Management is well hidden. The easiest way to get to it and other consoles is to right-click My Computer and select "Manage".

Here, you can import a drive, partition, format and reletter it. You *may* need to delete the partition and then recreate it, but just try assigning a letter.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_management.htm


__________________

[fortheloveofdog]

Thanks, i'll try it out.