External Hard Drive format

Icemopper

This might be a rather silly question to some, but I'm rather perplexed, so here goes:

I have an external hard drive that is pretty large, 500GB to be slightly more precise, and a bit ago, I used it for class (a music technology class) to save files for software that PC's don't run. This software was stuff that only apple computers could run, so I had to format my hard drive to work on Apple computers. Now it is stuck that way, it seems, and I can't get my Windows Vista computer to recognize that anything significant is plugged into the USB port. How do I get it so Windows will recognize it, whether that means losing data or not, I don't mind.

TL;DR: How do I re-format an Apple external hard drive to make it a windows external hard drive?

BladeX

Use Disk Management:

https://iomega-eu-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/iomega_eu_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=16551&p_sid=RWwUR*Ai&p_lva=&p_sp=&p_li=#vista

Topweasel

Icemopper wrote: »

This might be a rather silly question to some, but I'm rather perplexed, so here goes:

I have an external hard drive that is pretty large, 500GB to be slightly more precise, and a bit ago, I used it for class (a music technology class) to save files for software that PC's don't run. This software was stuff that only apple computers could run, so I had to format my hard drive to work on Apple computers. Now it is stuck that way, it seems, and I can't get my Windows Vista computer to recognize that anything significant is plugged into the USB port. How do I get it so Windows will recognize it, whether that means losing data or not, I don't mind.

TL;DR: How do I re-format an Apple external hard drive to make it a windows external hard drive?

Chances are that it just doesn't recognize the partition. If your not worried about the information you can go to Administrative tools in the control panel (classic view) and open computer management. Go down to storage and open Disk management. Find your external HDD, in that should be the partition created for the Mac. Right click on that partition and format in NTFS. You should just be able to live with the defaults.

Icemopper

Thanks, I'm looking there, and it doesn't show up. It does, however, show up in the device manager as a USB Mass Storage Device... But I can't do much from there it seems.

RBach

It should be showing up in Disk Management. Can you post a screen shot of what it does show?

Everywhereasign

Worst case run a flavour of Linux off a CD/DVD. It'll recognize the Apple partition and let you re-format it to anything you want.

Icemopper

Here's a screen shot: the upper two, I believe, are definitely not it, and the other three are also definitely not it.

RBach

Disk 2, the 465.76GB drive with the 200MB EFI System Partion and 465.57GB Unallocated space looks to be the external hard drive. I'm rather puzzled why the EFI partition exists and why the rest of the drive doesn't appear to be partitioned, but whatever. If you right click on the EFI partition you should be able to delete it, making the entirety of Disk 2 unallocated. Right click on the unallocated area and you should have the option to create a new volume.

matt has a problem

The 200 meg partition is probably for the external's firmware. I know a LaCie external drive I have has a 100 meg 'system reserved' partition that I can't touch.

Echo

matthasaproblem wrote: »

The 200 meg partition is probably for the external's firmware. I know a LaCie external drive I have has a 100 meg 'system reserved' partition that I can't touch.

And just the other day I was reminiscing with friends about the days when you complained over video drivers coming on three floppies!

RBach

No, OSX will create that partition when it formats a hard drive. It's necessary for Mac firmware updates but I have no idea why it's there on an external hard drive. Besides, I highly doubt such a partition would be EFI-formatted if was was reserved for the drive's firmware. Either way, it won't hurt anything to leave it there just to be safe.

PeregrineFalcon

I somehow doubt that that drive has 200MB of firmware in an EFI partition that can be touched without a drive firmware update tool.

Nuke it from orbit.

Icemopper

matthasaproblem wrote: »

The 200 meg partition is probably for the external's firmware. I know a LaCie external drive I have has a 100 meg 'system reserved' partition that I can't touch.

Yeah, I can't touch it, but I told it to format the big fat empty area so it is doing that now, hopefully that works.

Sorry I missed it earlier, I could have sworn it was my wife's external, but for whatever reason I completely missed that it was already there. I guess I'm used to seeing 2 HDD's and one external, and being on her computer, I guess I was thrown off.

Thanks again.

Icemopper

Update time:

I was able to format it, however, it won't show up when I open up "My Computer" to put stuff on it.

Here's what I see in Disk Management:


I can't touch that EFI partition, it won't let me do anything to it.

Any ideas?

RBach

Right click on "Icemopper's Externl". You should have the option to Change Drive Letter. The dialog that opens should let you assign a drive letter to it.

Icemopper

Wow, well that was incredibly easy.

Thanks much!

Icemopper

New Problem, sorry to keep pushing this up there.

Ok, Vista recognizes it, but my old computer running XP doesnt, (I'm trying to use this hard drive to remove the items that are important to me before I re-format it). It has been having problems, and I have no idea why it won't be recognized, but do any of you have a clue?

Thanks much.

This is what I'm seeing on XP: