reformat an external hard drive for windows from mac

sinatrasally

Honorable
Feb 7, 2014
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10,510
Hi there!
I am trying to reformat an external seagate harddrive for use on my windows 7 running PC. The drive used to be used on a mac so is probably in the wrong format so isn't automatically detected when I plug it into my PC.

I can find the drive using Device Manager and it says the drive is working fine, but it doesn't show up on windows explorer or my computer, which is where other tutorials say to reformat from...

Any guesses as to how to detect and reformat the drive for use on the PC?
(Unfortunately the old mac is now cactus so I cant just reformat from there...)

Thanks a lot!
 
Solution
haha, i had the exact same problem and I came up with a solution. I have an external seagate 2TB USB3 HDD, I used it for my Mac and when I used it on windows, I isn't there and i can't backup but the light was on. This is what you have to do:

1)just search format on the windows search option on start, open the program called "create or partition hard disk partitions"

2) You will be able to see your drive in this application, right click on the unallocated space and there should be an option called format.

3)It should then format the drive to NTFS.

4)The drive will now appear in the start/computer menu.

Hope this helps.


P.S, I couldn't format it from my Mac as it only formatted it or wiped it to it's MAC OS Journaled thing.

haha, i had the exact same problem and I came up with a solution. I have an external seagate 2TB USB3 HDD, I used it for my Mac and when I used it on windows, I isn't there and i can't backup but the light was on. This is what you have to do:

1)just search format on the windows search option on start, open the program called "create or partition hard disk partitions"

2) You will be able to see your drive in this application, right click on the unallocated space and there should be an option called format.

3)It should then format the drive to NTFS.

4)The drive will now appear in the start/computer menu.

Hope this helps.


P.S, I couldn't format it from my Mac as it only formatted it or wiped it to it's MAC OS Journaled thing.

 
Solution