Need to undo a New Simple Volume on Windows 7 on a Western Digital 500GB external hard drive formatted for OS X.

[reneepetra]

Hi. I have a Western Digital external hard drive with files in two of the three partitions. I formatted it for OS X a few years ago before adding these files. Now I am trying to read these files on a Windows 7 laptop. Many of the threads I read said to "assign it a letter to see your files."

The only way I could do that is to create a New Simple Volume. Did I make a big mistake here? Now that I did that, my Apple won't read the drive, and my Windows 7 laptop won't read it unless I format it, which I don't want to do for fear of losing all the files. Can someone please help me? Can I undo this New Simple Volume thing, or do I need to? Thanks so much.

- Renee

 

[RealBeast]

Did you make a big mistake? Yes.

OSX uses a file format incompatible with Windows and creating a Windows partition would not change that, those partitions would still not be accessible. Unfortunately your data may be lost.

My suggestion to see if you can access the data is not to reformat yet. I would download and install the 10 day trial of HFS for Windows and attempt to mount the OSX partitions on a Windows machine and copy the data from them to another drive. Then reformat the drive.

If you want to share a drive between Mac and Windows, format in FAT or if you have newer Mac and Windows version you could also use exFAT. I would probably do that format on the Mac.