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General discussion

external HD: can read on one XP system but not another

Mar 23, 2005 12:54PM PST

Dear Smart People,

Searched the forums for similar posts but couldn't find any.

I have a 200 GB Seagate external hard drive that I formatted for use on Mac and PC (FAT32, I think).

The drive works on a Mac.

The drive works on PC #1 (Dell Inpsiron 1100 notebook, Celeron 2.00GHz, Windows XP + SP2). It shows up as "Healthy" in the Disk Management utility, it's assigned a drive letter, and it's fully accessible.

On PC #2 (Sony VAIO VGN-FS570, Pentium M 740, 1.73GHz, Windows XP + SP2), it shows up as "Unallocated" in Disk Management, it's not assigned a drive letter (not an option), and it's not accessible.

I can't figure out why. I'm using a USB connection on both computers (although the same thing happens with the Sony's IEEE 1394 connection). Both notebooks have MacOpener installed. I don't want to reformat the drive because it already has data on it. Any ideas?

(By the way, Sony tech support couldn't figure it out and told me to contact Seagate. Seagate tech support told me they won't support this drive because it was formatted for both Mac and PC.)

Discussion is locked

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You're in noman's land.
Mar 23, 2005 8:28PM PST

There is no support for this since you have Mac, over 200GB drive and more. I don't expect you to find support or simple cure.

What will work is a network attached drive (NAS). It's much like a miniature file server on ethernet.

Bob

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NAS
Mar 24, 2005 4:34AM PST

Thanks, I will research this.