Problems accessing my external hard drive

regulus · 19 Dec 2009 at 15:38

Hey,

Have a Seagate external hard drive that I plug in, is recognised by Win 7 as present, installed and faultless, yet I cannot seem to find any way to access it under 'My Computer'. Any ideas?

Memphis · 19 Dec 2009 at 15:40

Right click "Computer" in the Start Menu, select "Manage", go to Disk Management section, find your external drive, right click and select the "Change drive letter and paths" option.

regulus · 19 Dec 2009 at 15:49

thanks for the help so far, it's excellent. I followed you instructions and found the drive, I just cannot seem to locate the 'Change drive letter and paths' option.

regulus · 19 Dec 2009 at 15:50

google and found it, it's a right click. However, it's greyed out.

Memphis · 19 Dec 2009 at 15:57

Hmmm, the drive's definitely partitioned and formatted yeah?

regulus · 19 Dec 2009 at 15:59

Shows a Healthy 200 MB (EFI system Partition) and a healthy 931.19 GB (Primary Partition). One thing I must add is that I've only been using this on the Mac and plugged it in for the first time on my Windows PC. Does it need another format?

Memphis · 19 Dec 2009 at 16:07

Ah, that'd be it then I think. I don't 'think' Windows can read Mac drives out of the box, as it were.

You would need to re-partition and re-format for it to work. I have to say though I'm not totally clued up about Mac file systems, so hopefully someone who is could say for sure

.

jellybeard999 · 19 Dec 2009 at 16:07

regulus said:
Shows a Healthy 200 MB (EFI system Partition) and a healthy 931.19 GB (Primary Partition). One thing I must add is that I've only been using this on the Mac and plugged it in for the first time on my Windows PC. Does it need another format?

How is it formatted? It's not an Apple propreitary file system is it?

regulus · 19 Dec 2009 at 16:10

Not sure if it is. It just worked on Mac. Currently playing around with Partition Magic 8.0 to see if I can format it again but it don't work too well under Win7

regulus · 19 Dec 2009 at 16:30

Turns out it's not NTFS formatted and when I tried to format it with the Seagate Installation software, it just says it failed without any further prompting on how to solve this.

regulus · 19 Dec 2009 at 17:16

Wrestled with it for the last hour and sorted it with DiscWizard from Seagate. Now formatted with NTFS, working and not being touched again... ever