Cant see hard drive?????

[DSSo]

HI, Just joined but have read and learned a lot from this site!!!
Ok, Windows 7 Pro plenty of ram etc etc..............

I have an external hard drive (GoFlex Seagate 1.5 TB) that works great on my Windows XP Pro machines. When I opened it up

in the past I just saw all the folders of things I have in there. It was under my computer and the little pop-up would happen

in the lower right corner of my computer with a sound. There was no partitian.

Someone put some music and a program (altho I don't think the content matters but trying to give all details). He did this

from a macbook. I was not there. He then showed me what he had done thru his computer. It was all there!!!! I could see

our recordings and the program he gave me. Now, I was seeing this thru his computer on my hard drive just to be clear.

I have a new computer that is the Windows 7 Pro. I never plugged it in there yet till now.
I plug it in on new computer and can hear the beep. There is a hard to see icon that says when I place the mouse over it,

"safely remove hardware and eject media"! When I pursue it and press it I get 2 options.
1, Open device and printers.
2, Eject the Goflex (when I do hit eject I get a pop up saying it is now safe to remove)
I am not sure what all that means!!!!!!!

Onward to the problem,
I plug it back in.
I go to my computer and it is not there. I go to disk management and it shows up.
Disk 0 is my OS.
Disk 1 is my internal #2.
Disk 2 is the External I am trying to use.
So I right click it and have options until I try to use one and low and behold they WONT click! Oh wait, DELETE VOLUME

will!!! LOL No extend or shrink even tho I can see them.
It states when I click it , Healthy (Active, primary partitian)

I have tried it on my XP machines it worked on but now nothing!!!!

I cant access ANYTHING on it and the guy who did it is deploying back overseas. In all the confusion I "may" have heard him

say he had to format it to mac at one point but then put it back?

HELP!!!!!! I have tried to explain exactly what has happened and my set up.

Thank you in advance!!!

[H20nly]

hmmm...

when you're in Disk Management click on the drive... not the label (disk0 etc) but to the right of that (the bar that represents the disk and data)... you could try changing the drive letter to see if that shakes something loose.

also, while you're in that spot, right click and go to Properties. from there you should be able to go to Security (tab). you could try adding the Everyone permission and making sure that Read & Write are both ticked... i think... or maybe i'm thinking about this from a networking perspective. Another thing you could try from the Properties window is to click on Tools (tab) and the first section should be called something along the lines of Error Checking. there should be a button that will allow you to check the drive for errors and fix them.

i'm thinking mounting it via Macbook might have messed with the file table.

[outsidesys]

And also when you're in Disk Management, it should give you the file system type too. It's listed after the size of the partition, and above the line that says Healthy (Active, primary partitian). Hopefully it says NTFS for the file system.

[H20nly]

^ yeah. true.

if that guy formatted your drive for a Mac OS you're toast. i believe that is HFS... but Windows only recognizes Fat32 and NTFS.

you could re-format the drive to work with Windows, but it will be blank when you're done.

[DSSo]

Ok, I can right click the drive as I said and see the options but I CAN NOT use them for some reason like drive letter etc.
The other drives clearly say NTFS and this one says nothing as far as that.

[DSSo]

Even if I could just transfer the stuff to another drive I have no prob reformatting it but thats the easy part.

[outsidesys]

If Windows doesn't know the file system type, it won't assign a drive letter. I would suggest you get that drive hooked up to a Mac to see if it will recognize it.

[SuburbanThug]

^ yeah. true.

if that guy formatted your drive for a Mac OS you're toast. i believe that is HFS... but Windows only recognizes Fat32 and NTFS.

you could re-format the drive to work with Windows, but it will be blank when you're done.

This is your problem.

[DSSo]

Ok, if thats the problem I can put it on my friend of a friends mac at some point and transfer everything. THENNNNNNN make the external hard drive EsFat or something like that? And that way it will work on both? Then when I am done I can made it NTFS again.

Is this my best way to go???

[H20nly]

ExFat is the best way to go if you want to be able to read and write from both.

[DSSo]

http://www.catacombae.org/hfsx.html

That will let you extract data to a drive on a oc from a mac drive.

AWESOME!!

Thanks for the help!!!

[fishmonkey]

if that doesn't work for you, there is also MacDrive:

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive