So I have a FreeAgent External Hard Drive that my coworker wants me to fix and I am having some issues. Recently they plugged the FreeAgent drive into a Mac and formatted it to work with a Mac, but now wants it to work again on a PC... when she plugs it up to her PC or anyone's PC it does not recognize it at all. The icon appears in the bottom left hand corner that stands for "found new hardware", but a bubble never appears saying that it found it. Please help.
This is the Most likely andswer for your problem.
A
Windows PC won't "find" a Mac formatted drive since it's not in a format that the PC can recognize.
the "new device recognized" means that Windows found the external USB enclosure.
You will need to re-partition and re-format the drive before the PC an use it.
From Windows XP help:
To create a partition or logical drive
Using the Windows interface
Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, click Disk Management.
Right-click an unallocated region of a basic disk, and then click New Partition, or right-click free space in an extended partition, and then click New Logical Drive.
In the New Partition Wizard, click Next, click Primary partition, Extended partition, or Logical drive, and then follow the instructions on your screen.
Notes
To open Computer Management, click Start, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.
You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings might also prevent you from completing this procedure.
You can create primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives only on basic disks. You should create basic volumes instead of dynamic volumes if this computer also runs MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows XP Home Edition.
On a master boot record (MBR) disk, you can create up to four primary partitions, or three primary partitions and one extended partition.
On a GUID partition table (GPT) disk, you can create up to 128 primary partitions.
If Disk Management doesn't see the drive, then you have a different problem.
thanks dailun for your response.
Ok, I right clicked on the free space in an extended partition and a right click menu did not show up. Am I supposed to right click on the drive and then click delete partition first.
You probably want to delete ALL existing partitions and then create a new partition on the drive.
NOTE: PLEASE BE VERY CAREFUL AND MAKE SURE OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING SO THAT YOU DON'T DELETE SOMETHING YOU DON'T WANT TO.
Right click on ANY existing partitionS OF THE EXTERNAL DRIVE AND delete them. Once you have deleted all of the partitions you can then create a new parition and format it for use.
