Mac WD Studio not working on Windows

foreright

foreright

foreright

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Joined
19 Jan 2005
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464
Location
Romford, Essex
My son who uses a Mac bought a WD Studio for me to copy some files to. I am a Windows XP user and cannot see the drive in Explorer etc.
The box states that to use the drive on W XP, Vista etc. will require the drive to be formatted. If I cannot see the drive how do I get over the problem please.
I can see all my external Samsung and Lacie drives OK only this WD Mac one poses the problem. Please help.
 
If you format the drive then you'll lose anything which is already on it. Also if you format it as NTFS to allow XP to write to it then when you give it back your son won't be able to write to it.

What is the long term usage of the drive likely to be?
 
Thanks for the reply. After a bit of searching I have found the way to format it to NTFS for windows use.
It is to be used to play 300+ DVD rips (my personal ones ripped to MKV that I use on a Media Player. He intends to play them using Plex on his Mac / Samsung TV.
As you are aware that for me to copy them from my PC the Mac drive has to be formatted to NTFS but that unfortunately means that he will NOT be able to write to it.
I shall have to do it tomorrow as it only formats at 1% every couple of minutes and bedtime beckons and we may have a storm tonight and the PC is going off.
If you can think of a way to format to another file system that can be written to by both windows and Mac and not Fat32 I will be interested or anything else I may have missed etc. Cheers.
 
If you format it as ExFAT it should be writeable on both. It's just as inefficient at storing data as FAT32 but it at least allows files > 4GB.
 
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