Sorry im new to all these technical terms. Im having the same problem. Just bought a 320gb external to use between my mac at home and pc's at work. Macintosh home design software. I formatted it to my mac (without realising that only may mac would be able to read it - as i said im a layman in terms of computers and the it world!!) and when i plug into my pc at work there is no recognition of it in My Computer. It recognises it in Safely Remove Hardware. I have a Mac OS X 10.6.3.

• How To Use An External Hard Drive

I cant seem t remove partitions in XP.all grey in drop down boxes etc should i try re-formatting on mac first??

How To Use An External Hard Drive

What is HFSExplorer? HFSExplorer is an application that can read Mac-formatted hard disks and disk images. It can read the file systems HFS (Mac OS Standard), HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and HFSX (Mac OS Extended with case sensitive file names).

HFSExplorer allows you to browse your Mac volumes with a graphical file system browser, extract files (copy to hard disk), view detailed information about the volume and create disk images from the volume. HFSExplorer can also read most.dmg /.sparsebundle disk images created on a Mac, including zlib / bzip2 compressed images and AES-128 / AES-256 encrypted images. It supports the partition schemes Master Boot Record, GUID Partition Table and Apple Partition Map natively.

If you want to transfer files from a Mac to Windows PC and vice versa using an external portable hard drive then you have to have the external drive formatted in a file system both OS's can read.

You may be interested in the application if you're: A user of an Intel Mac running Windows with Boot Camp in need of accessing the files on the Mac OS X hard drive. Owners of HFS+-formatted iPods, that wish to access their content from within Windows or elsewhere (a user emailed me and verified that this works). Users of PearPC or similar Mac emulation/virtualization software that wish to access the contents of their virtual hard disks (will only work if the disk image is stored in raw format, as in PearPC). People that need to access the contents of HFS+-formatted.dmg /.sparsebundle files. HFSExplorer is written mostly in Java 5, optionally using some Java 6 / 7 features, with some Windows-specific parts written in C in order to be able to get raw access to block devices, and to create a practical launcher application. Linux and OS X users should in most cases not need HFSExplorer for browsing file systems on devices, since there are native file system drivers available on those systems, but it seems to work fine if you need it.

Linux users might find use for opening.dmg /.sparsebundle files.

I am trying to reformat an external seagate harddrive for use on my windows 7 running PC. The drive used to be used on a mac so is probably in the wrong format so isn't automatically detected when I plug it into my PC.

I can find the drive using Device Manager and it says the drive is working fine, but it doesn't show up on windows explorer or my computer, which is where other tutorials say to reformat from. Any guesses as to how to detect and reformat the drive for use on the PC?

(Unfortunately the old mac is now cactus so I cant just reformat from there.) Thanks a lot! Haha, i had the exact same problem and I came up with a solution. I have an external seagate 2TB USB3 HDD, I used it for my Mac and when I used it on windows, I isn't there and i can't backup but the light was on. This is what you have to do: 1)just search format on the windows search option on start, open the program called 'create or partition hard disk partitions' 2) You will be able to see your drive in this application, right click on the unallocated space and there should be an option called format. 3)It should then format the drive to NTFS. 4)The drive will now appear in the start/computer menu. Hope this helps.