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I can locate my external hard drive but can't open it.

Tags:
  • Movies
  • Disk Management
  • External Hard Drive
  • Storage
  • Macintosh
Last response: in Storage
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July 10, 2014 7:56:25 AM

I have a Media Magic external Hard Drive with movies on it which have been transferred via a mac. I am trying to open them on a windows 8.1 PC but to no avail. At first I couldn't locate the hard drive on 'my computer' or 'disk management' but realised it was just called '111.79 GB' in Disk 1. However now when I right click it in disk management, the only option not "greyed-out" is 'delete volume'. Is there a reason I can't open it? Any help would be amazing as I have no computing knowledge and so far have used Youtube videos and forum posts to get this far! Thanks, Kate :) 

More about : locate external hard drive open

a b G Storage
July 10, 2014 8:07:51 AM

The external hard drive is probably using a format which will only work in Mac, not on Windows, the drive would have to be formatted to NTFS, ext4, (or FAT32 but that has a max file size limit of 4GB) to be readable in Windows.

If it is formatted with HFS+ you could install this which should allow you to have basic read access.
http://hfsplus.codeplex.com/
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a c 100 G Storage
July 10, 2014 9:01:01 PM

Technically, you may need to install programs like HFSExplorer or Linux Reader on your Windows PC because Windows won’t normally read Apple’s Hierarchical File System (HFS) without the additional file system drivers.
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