Internal-External HD

talk random
1

I have a 40gb external HD that I took out of my old PC before we threw it away.

I bought one of those IDE to USB 2.0 cables so that I can actually use it. I’v been using it with my Powerbook G4 for a while, and had it formatted for Mac. It’s been working on the Mac with no problems.

Now I plug it into my PC and the little balloon thingy pops up a few times and eventually says ‘The device is now ready for use’ or something similar.

Dosen’t work! The drive dosen’t show up in My Computer, i’m guessing becuase it’s not formatted? How can I format it if it’s not even showing up?

I wanna back up all my music (it would be a tragedy if I somehow lost it all) as iv not got it backed up at all.

2

you know if you format the drive, you will (for the purposes of this conversation) lose your data, right?

if you still want to format, right click on my computer and go to Manage. then go to Disk Management. find your drive on there, right click> Format.

3

My roommate had a Mac and formatted his 250GB to some propiratory(sp?) Apple format. That might be the reason, plug it back in your Mac and see if you can format it as NTFS.

4

Yeah I want to format it, i’m pretty sure there’s nothing on it. Nothing important anyway…

I can’t plug it into my mac, it’s down in London. Won’t be able to use it for like 2 months.

bwh2 - The drive dosen’t show up when I do that.

5

Ok, might as well format it to NTFS, it’s even Mac compatible.

6

Well, NTFS is only sort of Mac compatible. They can read it but can’t write to it. FAT32 will do both. If you look in the device manager does it show up there? If so what does it show up as?

7

Not to mention the fact that a mac cant format it as NTFS, only Fat32

8

I can’t format it, it dosen’t show up anywhere!

If it showed up in my computer or the device manager I wouldent have needed to post this topic…

9

oo…play around with jumpers?

10

So under device manager you don’t get any unrecognized devices, or extra items under the USB hub? I’d say your best bet is to hook it back up to IDE, fdisk and format it and then put it back on USB and see what you get.

11

Oh wait it’s come up in the device manager and i’m formatting it now…

Wierd, it just suddenly started detecting it :huh:

Yay! Now I have another 40gb to mess about with!

Got like 200gb of storage space now :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the help dudes :slight_smile:

12

so a couple of things, when you hook it up to power, can you feel the power running through it (ie is the disk spinning)? as maxtrosity mentioned, what are the jumpers set to?

the current format is sort of irrelevant until you can get the drive recognized in disk management.

13

Yay for automagically repaired hardware! Actually it always makes me nervous when something (software or hardware) just fixes itself. To me it just means it may just break itself again somewhere down the line. At least it works now though.

14

sweet deal.