[IT dummy]

hi everyone

I am tearing my hair out because i've tried to get this Mac hard drive to work on my winxp and all these programs that are supposed to fix it don't help at all so hopefully you can.

its a Noontec Sun Lite hard drive and its model U235 (if that helps). I tried TweakUI- that didn't work- it just showed that all my drives had red circles with white question marks on them.

then i downloaded MacDrive 7 which is supposed to render any mac drives compatible on windows but that didn't work either- it suggested in its Help section that i needed to get a driver to make it work but i have no idea what that means or where to get one.

please help!

 

[justpassingby]

Hi IT dummy and welcome to TSF !

The drive is in the MAC OS file format, XP only recognizes FAT32 and NTFS. If you want to use the drive in both Mac and Windows environments you need to format it in FAT32, else NTFS is the way to go with Windows.

Use this guide to format the drive as FAT32 from a MAC (select the MS-dos file system) : http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html

To reformat the drive within Windows right-click my computer => manage => disk management. You should see the drive with an "unknown file system" message there. Right-click => delete the partition, create a new one and format as FAT32 or NTFS.

Be warned that reformating the drive will erase its content, if there's still data on it hook it on a MAC and backup first. FAT32 file system doesn't support files bigger than 4GB.

 

[Receng56]

hi everyone

I am tearing my hair out because i've tried to get this Mac hard drive to work on my winxp and all these programs that are supposed to fix it don't help at all so hopefully you can.

its a Noontec Sun Lite hard drive and its model U235 (if that helps). I tried TweakUI- that didn't work- it just showed that all my drives had red circles with white question marks on them.

then i downloaded MacDrive 7 which is supposed to render any mac drives compatible on windows but that didn't work either- it suggested in its Help section that i needed to get a driver to make it work but i have no idea what that means or where to get one.

please help!

Is this drive in an external case, or are you trying to install it in your computer? I use Mac Drive, but as far as I know it will only work with external USB/Firewire drives.

 

[blah789]

Does the drive already have data on it? If so don't format it without backing up first!
TweakUI has red circles and white questions marks on drives that don't exist! (I'm guessing you went to "My Computer" then Drives in TweakUI? - that setting is just for showing or hiding them - sometimes you have a drive you just want to hide when you open "My Computer" and TweakUI lets you do that from there by unchecking the box).
Well first you should check is the drive detected? Go to start, run, then type diskmgmt.msc
Do you see your Mac drive in there? Is the size correct (within roughly 7%)? And does it show it as partitioned (but perhaps not a known file system like NTFS, FAT, or FAT32)?
Also check in device manager (right click my computer, properties, hardware tab, device manager) - you should see an extra drive under Disk Drives (I think - not sure how USB drives are detected).
If all the above checks out, what does MacDrive say? Does it display any error message? Is there an initialization wizard you have to go through to detect the drive?