Can see drive on mac but not on Win7?

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hi

Had a very frustrating 24hrs…

Want to use my passport manually (not via the smartwaree) on my laptop PC AND on my mac.

So managed to reformat as Fat32 so i can use both

And have removed the Virtual CD stuff, using the tool WD prescribe

So on the mac  - the drive shows up as a useable drive

and i have backed up some files manually to it

All good!

But on my Win7 laptop, i just cant see it in Explore / My computer

Yet its shown as a Device under Control panel

I have tried different usb cable - no good

I have rebooted and gone thru power cycles - no good

i have removed the driver - and then Windows says it installed it when i re-attach - but still no sign of the actual drive that i can physically copy stuff over to?

HELP!!!???

All i want is to be able to use it like a mem stick and drag some stuff onto it - both from my laptop and mac!

Any more ideas would be much appreciated!
northy

2

looks like you did not correctly formatted the drive as a FAT32 Partition

Please make sure to properly format on FAT32

you will limitations with FAT32 since you can not transfer files larger than 4 gb… if it works for you fine…

if not… you can get HFS Explorer to read Mac formatted drives on Windows or you can get NTFS 3G to read Windows formatter drives on Mac 

3

mmm - maybe - but i did follow the instructions closely (format as Dos on my mac - the recommended route) AND have then managed to put 200gb data from the mac.

I guess i have little choice but to reformat…but im not convinced!

in parallel im trying to get admin rights so i can edity the disk settings on my pc.

4

PS
and if it helps - before i got rid of the VCD, the pc did show the VCD component…but i couldnt access the rest of the drive.

5

northy wrote:

mmm - maybe - but i did follow the instructions closely (format as Dos on my mac - the recommended route) AND have then managed to put 200gb data from the mac.

I guess i have little choice but to reformat…but im not convinced!

 

in parallel im trying to get admin rights so i can edity the disk settings on my pc.

 

if the drive was not formatted on FAT32 you can not do anything on Windows…

If you want to check the partition before formatting you can get info on the Mac…

When formatting FAT32 make sure to select MBR as the option and not the Apple Partition type 

1 Like
6

wow - i could have sworn i did it as FAT…seemed not!

i have now reformatted, and it works on both Mac and PC

Thanks Wizer - that will teach me for doing things late at night

Northy

7

glad to know it worked :smiley: