Solved External HD problems

[Delmi]

I was given a External HD sometime ago and only until today have I gotten around to it. I plugged it in and...nothing. It only appears here:

 

 

 

 

and not in my computer. This gives me absolutely no way of adding files to the HD obviously. I've tried updating the driver to see if that'd help, but it said it was already up to date. Any ideas or am I being completely daft and missing something that's right in front of me?

[CaptainChar]

you might need to go to managment, and possiblly activate the partition, i dunno if this is an issue in win7 etc, in xp it will not show up peroid unless the partition is activated, and usually requires a format of that drive as well

[Delmi]

I have absolutely no idea how to do that. I am running Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit. I'll try to do some more research.

[Inyri]

This is a dumb question (but those are the ones that always stump me) but did it come with an installation CD? Your computer isn't recognizing it which usually means a driver issue. Are you also sure it's compatible with your version of windows?

[Delmi]

No, no CD. It's a hand me down from a friend with a Mac, which apparently is creating a problem (or so researching on Google tells me). I'd have to reformat it and I rather not delete the stuff that's already on there. I'll just have to splurge and get my own!

[Azatha]

Why not take the stuff of it on the friends mac computer and have him upload it somewhere like Dropbox, format, then download the stuff back onto it? Would save you some money from buying a new one.

[CaptainChar]

mac's use ext3 if im not mistaken, and windows cannot recongize that, depends how it was formated etc or if it was formated on the mac as well, i worked with macs for a bit

[CaptainChar]

Yeah I cant remember 100% I use swissknife partitioner myself for my externals, since I need large externals to be fat32 to playback on my xbox 360, wii, and blueray players.

[Delmi]

@@Caelum It took me a while to figure out the steps in that guide, but that worked. Cheers!

[CrimsonStrife]

Let me just add for future reference, that I have discovered if you are going to move a drive from PC to Mac, or back and forth, you should always "Safely Disconnect Hardware". Most people say you should do this regardless (I personally do not do it), but I discovered that if you do not, and you try to plug a drive from a PC into a Mac, the Mac can see the drive, but it cannot write to it.