Mac Mini and networked hard drive help

ok so i just got my 1st Mac Mini its a 2009 model.

i cant see / dont know how to find my network hard drive. i have a PC lop top and can see the HD through it but not the Mac Mini or i just dont know what i am doing.

so here is what i have.

dell laptop
Asus router
500gb hd with powered case hooked to router (can see on the dell but not mini)

i have all of my meida on the Network HD to save space on the laptop and Mini. laptop is wireless mini is hard wired.

If it doesn't appear in the finder sidebar as shared device then you should be able to open the finder then click "Go" in the menu bar and "connect to server" then type in either...

smb://ipaddress

or afp://ipaddress

replacing "ipaddress" with your hard drives ip address or host name.

ok thanks for the help.

i am not the smartest when it come to Macs and know enough on PC to get in trouble.
LOL

how do i find out what the IP address is of the HD?

If it's already connected to your Windows PC then you should be able to navigate to the mapped network drive and right click to view the properties which should indicate the IP address it's mapped too.

Additionally if network devices are not showing in the finder you should be able to open a new finder and click on "finder" in the menu bar and choose "finder preferences" Here you can choose which items you want to add to the sidebar which should include connected servers, bonjour devices. If you check these you should see a list of devices attached to the same network that you can connect to.

As a side not, your Mac should be able to read the drive regardless of the formatting but if the drive is formatted as NTFS you will not be able to write to it from your Mac. OS X requires the drive to be formatted as FAT (read and write from windows or os x) or HFS (read and write from OS X only). You can also buy and install paragon ntfs to your mac to be able to write to NTFS volumes.