External Hard Drive Compatible with Mac and Windows?

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External Hard Drive Compatible with Mac and Windows?

So my old laptop is a Dell Latitude and I bought a Western Digital external hard drive and put all my files/pics/music on it. The information the WD came with said its compatible with Mac and Windows, but when I plug it into my brand spankin new Macbook, it doesn't register with the computer and won't show up. What's going on?

Message was edited by: philliesphan

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Oct 28, 2007 5:51 PM

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Answer 1

TachoSJ

Level 1

5 points

Oct 29, 2007 8:44 PM in response to philliesphan

I have a similar problem with my Maxtor 200gb hard drive... I can access all my hard drive files and copy them onto my macbook but I can't write anything onto the external harddrive

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Answer 2

aschulz

Level 1

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Oct 29, 2007 9:20 PM in response to TachoSJ

I recently ran into that problem. In order to have the hard drive compatible for both PC and Mac it must be in a FAT32 format. In order to do this though all your files will be deleted (in order to reformat). You can do this by plugging in the hard drive into you mac and going under disk utility and there you will find your hard drive and under erase change the format to FAT32 and then you press erase (all will be deleted off the external drive though)

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Answer 3

TachoSJ

Level 1

5 points

Oct 29, 2007 10:07 PM in response to aschulz

so after doing that I will be able to putt stuff on the hard drive from both the mac and a pc??

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