Mac modified hard drive cant be seen by a PC

[Tanner31593]

Hello,

I recently took out all the old tiny hard drives out of my closet and plugged them into my external and erased them all on my Mac, now i go and connect them to a PC and it doesn't see it at all.

Is there anything I can download or do something that can make the PC see them?

Thanks everyone,
Tanner.

[Sherman Homan]

You would need to format it in FAT for both the Mac and PC to be able to read/write. It sounds like your drive is formatted in HFS+ which the PC can't see without a utility such as MacDrive.

[Tanner31593]

Well my PC currently doesn't have windows installed,
I planned on erasing the hard drive on my Mac (which I did),
And then putting the hard drive into my PC and installing windows onto that hard drive,
But when i erase and delete the partitions and then i put the drive into my PC and run Windows XP setup it does not detect the hard drive.

[baggss]

Just format it as FAT-32 on the Mac, should work fine on the PC.

[MaDDoG]

Tanner...when you erased the hard drive I say you have formatted it using Mac HFS+. You need to re format it as Fat 32 for you PC to read the drive. In Windows you frequently have to go into disk mamangement and drive management. There you make the drive active and allow the Win PC to see the drive.
Alternately when you put the install Win disk into the pc, reboot and the installation will take place frm the cd. The system should then guide you through the process if I remember rightly.

[knightlie]

Maddog is right, I think. When I put my old MacBook drive into a USB case and plugged into the PC, Windows reported the Mac partition as a "GPT protected partition" and wouldn't touch it - no properties, no format or anything. When you erase the drive on the Mac, go to the Partition tab, there's an option in there (I can't remember the details now) which will erase it completely without leaving the hidden Mac partition or anything behind. Then you can format it on the PC.

I'll look it up and post the details of that Partition tab.

[Kash]

Guys, he's having a problem getting Windows setup to recognize the drives, not Windows itself. Technically, the partition type should have no effect on setup finding the drive itself as then he would be able to delete the HFS+ partition and recreate a FAT32 or NTFS one.

Tanner, what sort of drives are these? Are they IDE (long connector) or SATA (small connector)? Are the drives enabled in the BIOS (this is especially important with SATA drives)?

Give us a bit more information and we'll try our best to help you out.

[MaDDoG]

Just a thought...have you looked at the jumper settings on the drive?

[knightlie]

Guys, he's having a problem getting Windows setup to recognize the drives, not Windows itself. Technically, the partition type should have no effect on setup finding the drive itself as then he would be able to delete the HFS+ partition and recreate a FAT32 or NTFS one.

If Windows itself won't touch a GPT protected partition I'd say is a dead cert that Windows Setup won't either.

[bryphotoguy]

It could be two things which are both mentioned. Check the jumper setting to make sure the main drive you want to use is set to master and any others set to slave. As for formatting them on your Mac, make sure they are formatted using the MS-DOS setting and not Mac Journaled or anything like that. It is the only one that a PC will read so you can install a fresh copy of Windows on them.
PM me if you need any more explanation.
Bryan