No disc inserted error on external SATA drive

This ine is complicated, I need to transfer video files from a formatted SATA drive. It's an intrernal drive that was formatted for PC by a Mac. Sorry but I don't know what model or OS. When I tried to view the contents of the drive using my Vista laptop, a docking stattion and USB cable, it saw the drive but said it had no disc. Now I'm forced to to try installing the drive into my desktop XP machine. What do I need to do to allow th e XP machine to see the drive and its contents?

I'm slightly confused by your phrasing but here is what I understand... Youa re using a SATA DVD or CD-RW drive and attempting to read a disc burnt on a MAC on your Windows box. (my confusion is that you might be talking about a hard drive, but it seems improbable).

You should have no issue as long as you use ISO compliant burining methods (Standard (HFS+/ISO 9660). The ISO methods work on all OS's as far as being able to read data. Your only problem might occur if you did not create a finalized disk (i.e. used a method other than disk at once). See this discussion (applies to a different file type, but that is irrelevant as the importance is the ability to read the file).

http://discussions.apple.com/threa [...] 8&tstart=0