01-11-2009, 04:42 PM

Before i bought my new mac, i loaded all my old itunes song on my PC to my 500GB mybook drive. When i plugged it in to the Mac, it said it needed to erase everything to use time machine, But now when i go to plug it back in to the PC to transfer my music, it doesnt even show up on the computer.
what do i do?

ps. sorry i just started using macs for the first time yesterday, so im really new to this.

01-11-2009, 05:00 PM

I believe its in a format that mac cannot use. You have to reformat the drive for a mac.

01-11-2009, 06:06 PM

No i dont think thats it, because it works fine for time machine. It shows up as "time machine" on the right side. What im trying to do is unplug the drive from the mac, plug it into the PC, put about 8GB music on it, then put all the songs on the new mac. The only problem i have so far, is when i plug it into the usb on the PC it doenst even show that it is there or plugged in.

And before i had the mac, and started using time macine, it worked just fine on the PC.

01-11-2009, 06:10 PM

You needed to erase everything if you wanted to use that drive as a Time Machine drive, if you didn't then you just click no.

By The sounds of it you may have wiped the external drive and set it as your time machine drive which is great as you have no got your backups set up, less so however if you do not have a copy of the data that was on there.

The pc can't read it as it is now set the the Mac format.

01-11-2009, 06:13 PM

Okay so how do i make it so its back in PC format?
i keep moving time machine to the trash, thinking that will do it, but nothing is working.

01-11-2009, 07:32 PM

Originally Posted by stuie801

Okay so how do i make it so its back in PC format?
i keep moving time machine to the trash, thinking that will do it, but nothing is working.

plug in the drive, Go to disk utility, Click on the drive, then look for partition. At the bottom you'll see a + tab. click this and adjust the size of the partition as needed. 10GB will suffice in most cases. Make sure the new partition is formated to fat32, click apply.

This will allow you to keep your current drive as a time machine drive and have a small piece that can be used by windows machines...

01-11-2009, 08:31 PM

Okay i got to the part where i chose 10GB and there is no fat32 format option

01-11-2009, 08:33 PM

IS there a ms dos fat option?

01-11-2009, 08:39 PM

with the format scroll bar it says
Mac OS extended (journaled)
Mac OS extended
Mac OS extended (case-sensitive, journaled)
Mac OS extended (case-sensitive)
MS-DOS (FAT)
Free Space


those are the only format options

01-11-2009, 08:48 PM

Originally Posted by stuie801

Okay so how do i make it so its back in PC format?
i keep moving time machine to the trash, thinking that will do it, but nothing is working.

Originally Posted by stuie801

with the format scroll bar it says
Mac OS extended (journaled)
Mac OS extended
Mac OS extended (case-sensitive, journaled)
Mac OS extended (case-sensitive)
MS-DOS (FAT)
Free Space


those are the only format options

MS-DOS (FAT) also know as FAT 32

01-11-2009, 09:34 PM

Okay, hey THANK YOU!! I got it, i needed to restart the PC and then it worked.
But thanks for your help and for replying so fast

01-11-2009, 09:35 PM

Originally Posted by stuie801

Okay, hey THANK YOU!! I got it, i needed to restart the PC and then it worked.
But thanks for your help and for replying so fast

Anytime buddy.