External Hard Drive Troubles?

How is your friend’s hard drive formatted? If it is Mac formatted, you won’t be able to read it without 3rd party software.

As simpleD said, if it is formated for a Mac, Vista won’t see poop. A simple way to see this is right click for properties and see what the file format is. If it is anything but NTFS, or FAT32(16), then it is mac formated (or something more proprietary.)

If this is the case, then the only way to get the stuff of the HDD is ether 3rd party software, or taking the files directly from your friend’s hard-drive, over a network. That usually works for me.

If you and your friend are split between a Mac and PC, and share files regularly, I would suggest you formate your external drives as FAT16, that being the best excepted between mac and PC, however it is unstable, meaning you should always safely remove the drive from both Mac and PC. I think FAT32 works for Leopard and Vista\XP, but I can’t remember.

Thanks. Thankfully, he is a “tech whiz” (his words, not mine) and knows how to do these things. I’m just useless when it comes to technology.

@amandal(I)a:
Hey! At least you found fluther! That is the fist step toward the wonderful life of geek\nerdizzam of technology!

omg. Mac actually has a proper spelling for nerdizzam… I… don’t… know… how to… feel about that…