External HDD and Time Machine problems please help!!!

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can anyone help me out with this? i set up my external drive for time macine and now my pc won't recognize the drive at all unless i go to computer management and it will not let me acces the drive from there either or let me format the drive on my pc so i can transfer files from the pc to mac. any suggestions out there of how i can fix this????
 

chscag

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When the drive was setup for Time Machine it was formatted as HFS+ which can not be accessed by a Windows PC. You do realize that if you reformat the drive to work with your PC it won't be usable for Time Machine?

To reformat the drive, attach it to your Mac and use Disk Utility to erase it and partition\format it for MS DOS (FAT-32).

You can also use third party software such as the free Linux GParted to do the partitioning and formatting.

Regards.
 
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thanks

When the drive was setup for Time Machine it was formatted as HFS+ which can not be accessed by a Windows PC. You do realize that if you reformat the drive to work with your PC it won't be usable for Time Machine?

To reformat the drive, attach it to your Mac and use Disk Utility to erase it and partition\format it for MS DOS (FAT-32).

You can also use third party software such as the free Linux GParted to do the partitioning and formatting.

Regards.

thanks a lot for the help i'll give that a shot. yeah i do understand i can't use it for time machine but i just wanna transfer my files from mypc then use it for time machine instead of using my 8 gig thumb drive to move over 100 gis of files. i'll let you know how it goes, thanks again
 
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hey i figured it out. thanks a lot i was thinkin i was gonna have to split the encasement and use it as an internal to reformat it. saved me a bunch of work
 

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