External WD USB Hard Drive Will Not Mount

I have a problem with a Western Digital Hard Drive. It is an external that hooks up via USB. The computer I am trying to hook it up to is an HP Latptop running Windows XP.

The problem is this:

This hard drive hooks up to my studio computer and stores all of our songs and files, and so I really don't wanna mess with it without the help of someone that knows what they are doing for fear of erasing everything on it accidentally.

The studio computer is an Apple PowerMac G5 and the hard drive is usually hooked up to it. I can mount it and access the files just fine on this computer.

I unhooked it and brought it home to back up some files from my HP Windows laptop and when I plug it into the laptop, it recognizes the drive and in device manager, it says it is enabled and working properly, but it is not showing up in My Computer. I can't access it or any of the files on it.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can get it to work without formatting for windows and erasing everything on it?

Ok, I see the problem, but you won't like to hear it.

Mac's have their own kind of formating-completly incompadable with windows.

That is why your hp laptop-a windows machine- can read it.

Simply put, the music on the drive is in english, the computer only speaks french, that is the basic issue.

I know this is not what you wanted to hear, but it is what you need to know.

Luckily it's not necessarily true the other way around. Try this, copy all of your files to the mac machine, format the drive in Fat32 or NTFS, which Macs can read, then copy all of your files back to the drive.

If you have the two machines networked hook up the drive to the mac and turn on the shares to the external drive you then can move the files to the xp laptop

if you got A CD or DVD with your external drive there might be a proggie on there that you could install on the xp machine to read the drive.



[edit on 29-6-2008 by The Utopian Penguin]

[edit on 29-6-2008 by The Utopian Penguin]

time involved aside, I strongly recomend following what Ras said,

He is correct and told you what I should have.

And now for Ras and his computer knowledge-the ATs dancers:

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can get it to work without formatting for windows and erasing everything on it?

He said he doesn't want to reformat the drive

You could go to the WD web site. They may have a free download of A free tool
proggie that would resolve your problem

Using Mac drives on Windows PCs

www.macwindows.com...

Here's the info you need

www.typhontools.cjb.net...

Here's a free tool you can download




[edit on 29-6-2008 by The Utopian Penguin]

hey, thanks for the help you guys.

When I said I don't want to format the drive, I meant I don't want to format it here because I don't have the Mac here to back up the files on. I guess I will just have to go to the studio and do like Ras said...I was just hoping there was a way for me to do it without going all the way back to the studio. Plus, there is like 200GB of data on it...thats a looooooong file move. But I see there is no other choice. This data is super important. I don't even want to take chances with it. I am in the process of purchasing another hard disk to back this one up also. I pretty much figured I'd have to format the drive to Windows, but I wanted to know if there was possibly any way around it.

EDIT: Wow, thanks UtopianPenguin. That HFSE Explorer tool is sweet. I actually don't have to format it. This is exactly what I was lookin for. Big Thanks. I am still going to format my new drive using NTFS though. So thanks for the heads up on that Ras. All of you have been very helpful.

[edit on 6/30/2008 by Mad_Hatter]

you can format the drive and use a recovery proggy to recover all the information that was ever on your ehdd. My old WD ehdd lost itas format out of nowhere one day and i had to reformat it, all my information was recovered.

Originally posted by Xilvius
you can format the drive and use a recovery proggy to recover all the information that was ever on your ehdd. My old WD ehdd lost itas format out of nowhere one day and i had to reformat it, all my information was recovered.

That does not come without risk.

Not all files are always recoverable, even with just a simple format.

Seems akin to lighting the couch on fire to see if a fire-ewxtinguisher works.
er, sunpin' like that, I'm tired, lol.