HELP! Harddrive not reading on Windows

[crowfm]

I have a Seagate 500MB harddrive that i recently bought.
Upon hooking it up to my other MacBook (I originally own a windows 7 desktop), I accidentally formatted it through Time Machine Backups. losing all the content of the hard drive.

When I tried to recover the data through various programs I ran across a problem of my windows OS computers not being able to read the hard drive (Desktop & a windows laptop) but only being able to read it on mac computers. When I hook up the hard drive, it shows up on device manager etc but I am not able to access it or do anything to it.

I tried everything that I need to do when facing a general 'hard-drive not reading' issue, such as trying to set a HD location and so forth, but I don't think that is the problem I have here. I think the HD was formatted into a form which only a mac can read.

The content of the hard drive is not as important (Just random videos/music, nothing essential), but not being able to be read it on my main desktop is a problem.

Help me please!

 

[xerxces]

Have you tried formatting it? Sounds like the data on it is gone already anyway.

 

[crowfm]

The HD was formatted anyway through the mac, the data is not the issue for me.

My concern is not being able to read it on a windows computer

 

[xerxces]

Might have to try to format it using a windows program.

 

[splatman213]

Did you format it to a Ntfs File system? macs use fat32, chances are its formated to fat32 at the moment

 

[crowfm]

so i need to format it to an ntfs file system for windows to be able to read it?

how do i do so at this point?

 

[getochkn]

Did you format it to a Ntfs File system? macs use fat32, chances are its formated to fat32 at the moment

Mac's can read FAT32, but more than likely it was formatted in Mac OS Extended (journaled), especially if he used it for Time Machine.



You can go to Control Panel, Administrator Tools, Disk Management, then find the drive in the list and right click on it and delete partition or volumes and then you should be able to make a new FAT32 or NTFS partition.

 

[NuclearShadow]

If you still have your windows installation disk you could boot up with that and easily format it, I am sure there are other 3rd party programs out there as well. Windows, Mac, and Linux use differing formats and do not come with a native compatibility to each other.

But again if you have your windows installation disc you should easily be able to boot from it and use it's format tools or perhaps you may be able to do so in windows itself by just viewing the drive under computer, right click the drive, and select format.

 

[getochkn]

If you can't delete the volume on there and repartition using the above method I posted, try this.

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

Is' about the best free partition manager out there I find.

 

[crowfm]

the right clicking the drive move doesn't work at all, it all comes up unclickable. I will try the software you mentioned.