Drive issue - anybody know why?

Fred Flinstone

Fred Flinstone

XP Divorcee - Mac Virgin
Hi....

I badly needed to dump a lot of clutter on my HD to storage bins and bought an internal ide 80Gb drive which you can hook up to your PC or Mac via a SATA/ATA to USB connection Cable.***

The Mac however does not seem to recognize it at all where PC does. In PC once it's recognized the rest is easy as you can use disk manager to assign a drive and format it. Without formatting the drive I could not find any tool in Mac that would even recognize the presence of the drive so that I could do similar - which would seem to indicate that any drive like this you intended to connect would first have to be pre-formatted on a Windows machine in the fat32 file system. Only when I did that would the Mac recognize it.

I hope someone can enlighten me on this because this very scenario kind of defeats the purpose altogether that in order to add drives and such I actually need a PC to do so!


*** This to me is an affordable and space saving solution as well as keeps the weight down if I am travelling
 
Blame Microsoft! They will not release the the capability of another operating system to read/write to NTFS formatted disks, including OS X and Linux.

So what you are trying to do is bend OS X to comply with Microsoft XP when XP doesn't share information to make it possible. OS X can only read NTFS, not write to NTFS. So it is time to bend XP to conform to Apple OS X. Download the program for Microsoft called MacDrive 6. This way you will be able to format any disk for Mac OS Extended and Windows could read/write to it with no problem.
 
Absolutely not - I am trying to dump information from my mac hard disc to a proprietary hard disk. The proprietary HD only becomes a "Microsoft' HD as you put it when it is formatted as such.

What I am saying is that unformatted the Mac did not even detect the drive. If I could have detected it I could have formatted it for the Mac. I am also saying that Windows did detect the unformatted drive so I formatted it to a file system that could be utilised by both Mac and Windows (as is the standard format for most extenal Drives these days anyway!)

Again neither Disk Utility or Disk Warrior was able to detect the presence of an unformatted drive so that I could format it - That is the problem. Only when formattedd as Fat32 on the Windows machine did Mac recognize it even existed!

I will however download this MacDrive6 you mention and test it when I get my next HD.

UPDATED - I just went to this site and it seems (hardly surprisingly) that this as you mention is a windows application. Where is the one for mac where first you can detect the drive then format it????

So we're still left with the same question. Thanks all the same satcomer you have given me some good advice of late!!!! Still looks like the only way you can add an extra HD to Mac is one that has been Preformatted either as Fat32 or NFS on a WINDOWS machine!!! I can certainly do the Fat32 in any number of ways without having to add this program to the repetoire. Possibly the easiest and best way of doing so on an NTFS system is to use Partition Magic. But this still seems to defeat the purpose for someone who had divorced windows and finds these little encounters rather a pain in the tushy. And this is a problem these days when Hard Disks fill up in no time at all. I'd simply like to be able to do all this on my mac without going anywhere near Windows - particularly the new cancer they have just unleashed on the world!
 
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