Having issues with Ext. HDD from XP

So I just made the switch...5 machines all with XP were running. I just bought a nice and shiny 24 inch Intel iMac and so far, I'm in love, one issue though. I had a 250 gig hard drive on my xp machine that holds all of my music and pictures and what not. Well I thought I could just plug it in and load everything up, but when I plug it in and power it up, it just shows two folders, RECYCLER and System Volume Information. The each have some numbered files in it. I did some research online and tried to install macFUSE and just could not get it to work or install correctly. Has anyone had this issue? Can anyone help?

What exactly do you mean you plugged it in? Did you stick it in an external enclosure and then plug it into the USB/Firewire port of the iMac?

G'day cmerrifield & welcome to Mac-Forums.

Well, I firstly did some research on MacFuse (very interesting) because I had never heard of it and wondered why you used it to solve your HD issues.

Secondly, we need to know more about your problem, like ... what kind of Mac do you have and what version of Mac OS do you have. Also, is your 250Gb HD an external drive? How was it formatted when you connected it to your Mac and did it work alright when you reconnected it back to your PC?

Ok, more information. The hdd is in an external exclosure, Nexstar I believe, and it was orgianlly formatted and used on a windows xp machine. When plugged back into the windows machine everything seems to work as normal. An interesting point is that when I tried to install macFUSE is asked which drive to install it on and one of the options was the external drive, and it showed 203 gigs out of the 250 gigs were already used so I know my information is on there, but it would not let me install to the external drive.

As for the OS, I'll need to check when I get home but I can tell you it is a brand spanking new iMac 24 inches. I just bought it yesterday then came home, set it up and let it do it's thing to update.

So far I am loving the mac, now if I can just get this to work so I can listen to my music!

One thing to check in Windows is how the partition is set up (go into control panel, then administrative tools, then disk/storage manager). If it is an extended partition or some other type, you will want to change the partition type to "primary", which would allow the partition to function on its own. Unless you use some program like PartitionMagic to change this on the fly, this will cause you to flatten your partition and have to re-copy everything off your primary drive, so be careful.

It doesn't matter what filesystem you use; OSX can read both FAT32 and NTFS partitions just fine.

Above all, be very careful when using the Windows disk utility. Double and triple check the drive letters and partitions before you do anything. It won't protect you from destroying all your data.

SO is Partition Magic the way to go here? I'm not sure I have enough room on the other drive to move everything over and then recopy it. I will be playing with this as soon as I get home and posting more. Besides this issue, the "switch" is going pretty well.

cmerrifield said:

SO is Partition Magic the way to go here? I'm not sure I have enough room on the other drive to move everything over and then recopy it. I will be playing with this as soon as I get home and posting more. Besides this issue, the "switch" is going pretty well.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I think you can d/l a demo of it to make sure it will do what you want. Check your drive settings in XP to confirm this is your actual problem first.

Ok, I go into Control Panel> Admin Tools> Computer Management> Disk Management. It lists out the External HDD and the regular C disk HDD. Then I'm looking at the External it has the following information.

Disk 1
Basic
232.88 GB
Online
NTFS
Healthy (Active)
Primary Partition

So it looks like it is already set up as a primary partition, it just doesn't want to actually pull up any information in my Mac.

Mac information
OSX Version 10.4.8

Any help? I don't want to try and partition when it looks like it's set up correctly.

That's odd... I've got a NTFS-formatted 250g external drive that I was using for capturing DV video, and it shows fine on my MBP.

By any chance does the drive show up under Apple's Disk Utility? Obviously you can't (and shouldn't) attempt to repair an NTFS drive with it, but at least if it shows an active partition.....

I'm also a little curious to know if any files/folders show up from the Terminal. If you felt comfortable with digging in a little Unix, you could issue something like:

ls /Volumes/my\ external\ drive/

Obviously replacing "my external drive" with the name of your external volume (adding a backslash before any spaces).

That is odd, the partition is set up correctly and should be read by OSX no problem. I did the exact same thing when moving my stuff over to an iMac last week.

Are you using Firewire or USB? If the enclosure give you the option to use both, try the other one. It could be that the enclosure itself is hinky, though to be honest this is a stretch.

If you can't get it working, hook it back up to your PC and share the entire drive. Then, access it through the iMac's Network area and copy your files that way. It will take longer, but it's not really worth spending the money to make it work considering this is a one-off deal.