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 post will show you how to format an External drive or USB disk making the drive work with both Windows PC and Mac can read and write. You will learn the.

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. P.S, I couldn't format it from my Mac as it only formatted it or wiped it to it's MAC OS Journaled thing.

If you have an external hard drive or USB flash drive that you’d like to use on both Macs and Windows PCs, choosing the right file system to format the drive can be confusing. Learn a few ways to make your drive Mac and PC friendly.

Need to access or transfer files between Mac and PC? As simple as this task sounds, it’s not very straightforward for inexperienced users. Since Mac OS X and Windows use totally different file systems, the way a drive is formatted can determine what type of computer it will work with. In fact, there are four ways you can format an external or USB flash drive to achieve varying degrees of compatibility between Macs and PCs. Let’s take a look at them: HFS+ Mac OS X’s native file system is HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended), and it’s the only one that works with Time Machine.

But while HFS+ is the best way to format drives for use on Macs, Windows does not support it. If you’re only going to be using your external or USB flash drive with certain PCs – such as at home or the office – you might be interested in a program called. When you install MacDrive on a Windows PC, it will be able to seamlessly read & write to HFS+ drives. This isn’t a good solution if you need your drive to work on any PC without installing software, though. NTFS The native Windows file system is NTFS, which is only partially compatible with Mac OS X. Macs can read files on NTFS drives, but it cannot write to them.

So if you need to get files from a PC to your Mac, NTFS is a decent option. However, you won’t be able to move files in the other direction, from Mac to PC. FAT32 The most universally supported way to format your drive is with the FAT32 file system.

It works with all versions of Mac OS X and Windows. Case closed, right?

Well, not so fast. Unfortunately, FAT32 is a very old file system and has some technical limitations. For example, you cannot save files that are larger than 4GB on a FAT32-formatted drive. This is a deal-breaker if you work with huge files. The other limitation is the total size of the partition. If you format your FAT32 drive in Windows, the drive partition cannot be larger than 32GB. If you format it from a Mac running 10.7 Lion, the drive partition can be up to 2TB.

It’s hard to send emails with attachments through my phone without transferring files to my web drive first. Can i just get outlook for mac desktop.