external hard drive, help@

?

)(*

Guest
I had a spare hard drive lying around formatted with the NTFS files system. I bought an external hard drive enclosure.

I hooked it up to my powerbook and the computer saw its, and formatted it to the mac file system.

I took the drive and hooked it up to my PC. and i couldnt see it on the PC, so i had to format the HD back to NTFS, but i did an NTFS quick format. so i brought the HD back to my laptop and the drive trys to start spinning but it stops and trys again and my powerbook cant see it. although when i plug it in, the CPU works harder, so i know something is going on.

I took the drive back out and plug it into my PC via IDE cable. And the computer sees it, all is well, but when i put it in the external hard drive enclosure it tries starting up again and no luck.
I put a different drive in it, and the enclosure works just fine, except with my spare drive


what do i do?
 
immdb

immdb


Joined
Nov 4, 2003
Messages
654
Reaction score
11
Points
18
Location
Southern Indiana
Your Mac's Specs
Mac Pro Quad Xeon 2.66GHz 3GB RAM, G4 Quicksilver w/Sonnet 1GHz Encore ST, 1ghz G4 Powerbook
Not exactly what you are getting on startup. I pulled this from Apple site…


Mac OS X 10.3 Panther works with local NTFS-formatted volumes. The volume will be read-only.

Warning: NTFS formatted drives cannot be used in a Macintosh (except as read-only with Mac OS X 10.,3 as noted above). If you attempt to use a NTFS formatted disk, upon starting up the Mac OS will prompt you to format the drive. Do not format the drive, doing so will erase the contents of the drive. If you have an NTFS formatted disk, you must use another method to transfer the data from the PC to the Macintosh.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75320
 
OP
?

)(*

Guest
so is there a way to format the drive, because i cant boot it as an external on my powerbook?
 
immdb

immdb


Joined
Nov 4, 2003
Messages
654
Reaction score
11
Points
18
Location
Southern Indiana
Your Mac's Specs
Mac Pro Quad Xeon 2.66GHz 3GB RAM, G4 Quicksilver w/Sonnet 1GHz Encore ST, 1ghz G4 Powerbook
I'm just guessing here…
what if you formatted it in a different format on the PC. Maybe then the Mac would prompt to reformat.
 
James

James


Joined
Nov 26, 2004
Messages
913
Reaction score
38
Points
28
Location
Oklahoma
)(* said:
I had a spare hard drive lying around formatted with the NTFS files system. I bought an external hard drive enclosure.

I hooked it up to my powerbook and the computer saw its, and formatted it to the mac file system.

I took the drive and hooked it up to my PC. and i couldnt see it on the PC, so i had to format the HD back to NTFS, but i did an NTFS quick format. so i brought the HD back to my laptop and the drive trys to start spinning but it stops and trys again and my powerbook cant see it. although when i plug it in, the CPU works harder, so i know something is going on.

I took the drive back out and plug it into my PC via IDE cable. And the computer sees it, all is well, but when i put it in the external hard drive enclosure it tries starting up again and no luck.
I put a different drive in it, and the enclosure works just fine, except with my spare drive


what do i do?
Click to expand...

If you want your external drive to be able to be both written to and read from by both your Mac and your PC, format the external drive with the fat 32 format. Make sure your drive has a volume name or the Mac won't read it. Once that is done you can read and write from both machines.
 
OP
?

)(*

Guest
James said:
If you want your external drive to be able to be both written to and read from by both your Mac and your PC, format the external drive with the fat 32 format. Make sure your drive has a volume name or the Mac won't read it. Once that is done you can read and write from both machines.
Click to expand...

I can only format it to NTFS under WindowsXP SP2. Under disk management.
oh this sucks.
 
immdb

immdb


Joined
Nov 4, 2003
Messages
654
Reaction score
11
Points
18
Location
Southern Indiana
Your Mac's Specs
Mac Pro Quad Xeon 2.66GHz 3GB RAM, G4 Quicksilver w/Sonnet 1GHz Encore ST, 1ghz G4 Powerbook
If you are running OS X, have you tried to see if it shows up in Disk Utility (Drive Setup in OS 9) ? If it does you can format it there.

If your system allows it, try booting from an OS 9 install cd. I believe that Drive Setup is on it.

Does it show in System Profiler?
 
OP
A

agentphish

Guest
use partition magic for PC and format the drive to FAT32. it will work both places that way.
 
OP
J

jeffshen

Guest
if you are formatting under disk management in Windows XP, the maximum allowed size is about 32 gigs? i am not sure, but if you select more than about that, it does not give you the option of formatting into Fat 32. otherwise you can plug the drive into your computer and try using Fdisk from the windows 98 boot disk and see whether that would work.

Jeff
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top