External HD

so i have a seagate 40gb portable hd. i use to backup my pc files (pictures, documents) on it. i had to send in my macbook to the store to fix some stuff and i plugged the external hd and saved my music files and such. i was succesfully able to copy the files.


now....i tried to connect the hd back to the pc and it wont let me open it, says "device is not formatted." when i plug it back into the mac it does not even recognize the hd anymore. when i plug it into the usb nothing happens. any ideas on what happend?

bumppppp

What filesystem is the hard drive formatted in? I'm pretty sure it needs to be FAT for OSX and Linux/Windows to read and write to the drive.

its FAT

bumpppp

Based on your post - the drive shows up on a Win machine as unformatted, but does not show up on your Mac?

So, when you plug it into the Mac:
1) Open a Finder window, does it appear there?
If it does, can you access the drive from there?
If you can, go into Finder preferences and put a check next to External disks under Show these items on the desktop.

2) Does the drive show up in Disk Utility?
If it does - try the repair options

3) If it does not show up in either of those locations - try another cable

4) If none of these work, would say worst case - the drive has failed, best case - the partition table has been damaged and will need to be re-formatted

There probably is some software out there that could be used to try to get the data off the drive, but do not know which ones would work with a FAT32 formatted drive.