problem with USB External drives, what format for Windose ?

Hi all, I have a very good friend who is besotted with Windose, I used to be, but thankfully I am now 100% apple. So this good friend asked me if I had any 2.5" hard drives I didn't want, preferably with USB external cases.

It just so happened I had 2 @ 320gb and 1 @ 250gb all SATA, all fully working in external cases, I had removed them from old Windose lap tops several years ago, and they worked extremely well with my Apple Lap Top and for exporting stuff from my Humax TV recorder.

So before I posted them off to him I formatted them to be FAT, the only Windose compatible format I can do with my Apple.

So I posted them off to him in exchange for some money, and he tells me they dont all work with all the different windose operating systems he has and he has got a few !

He has several different PC's and 1 Lap Top.

more confusing than ever, that is some work on some PC's but the same drives dont work on other PC's where some of them do, I dont really understand what is going on.

I dont know what format he has changed them to yet, but I would have thought these three FAT drives should all have worked on ALL of his Windose toys.

Any ideas anyone ? I am not very popular with him he lives about 100 miles away from me so he isn't going to throw them through my front window, not yet anyway !!!

Tim

PS. I do hope I have put this in the correct section ?.

timmy_toad said:

PS. I do hope I have put this in the correct section ?.

Click to expand...

Thread moved to better area. "Schweb's Lounge" is really for non-computer conversations. "Other Hardware & Peripherals" is better.

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

Thread moved to better area. "Schweb's Lounge" is really for non-computer conversations. "Other Hardware & Peripherals" is better.

- Nick

Click to expand...

Fair enough Nick thanks. I was a bit undecided because it is more of a Windose question than a Mac question !

Tim

timmy_toad said:

Fair enough Nick thanks. I was a bit undecided because it is more of a Windose question than a Mac question !

Click to expand...

Sometimes the forum categories are not a 100% "perfect fit" all of the time. Probably the two best categories for this question are:

- "Other Hardware & Peripherals"
- "Running Windows (or anything else) on your Mac"

Since the main question regards the formatting of an external HD (a hardware item)...and since it's external (a peripheral)...the "Other Hardware & Peripherals" seems to be the best area.

* Nick

How did you format the drives for him? If you used Disk Utility and did not check or make sure the format scheme stated "MS DOS", the disks may have been formatted incorrectly even though you chose FAT-32.

If that option is not selected, Disk Utility will place a small EFI partition at the beginning of the drive and continue to format the remainder as FAT-32. That causes the drive not to be read correctly on a PC or Windows machine.