Hi,

im new here :)

Ummm, here goes nothing.....

I just got a seagate 160gb external drive with usb2 and firewire. I plugged it into my winxp system and it worked perfect, and then into the macosx system at school and it worked perfect, but......

1: I unplugged the hard drive without releasing it from osx, oooops! I learned my lesson.
2: i went to plug it back in and it wouldnt be read by either the mac osx or my winxp system. came up with and error saying it was unformatted.
3: so i reformated in winxp, to fat32 (which it was at when it was working) had to use seagate tools to get it to detect in winxp so i can reformat it.
4: it now works on winxp perfectly, but not the macosx at school. Doesnt do a thing, not even a error.

Ive read up and i know that macosx can read fat32 and it did before my problems. Why isnt it working now? i read here that there is a limit on how big the drive can be. could this be the reason?

I formated it to fat32 (all 160gb more like 149gb). The wierd thing is that when i first got it, it was formatted for 142gb fat32 and it worked on the macosx. So what is the limit for fat32? and how do i extend it so that it will work with one partition of 142-149gb? I just want it back to how it was when i first go it. One partition of 142-149gb or so on fat32, that works with both winxp and macosx.

Any help? manufacturers (seagate) should give utilities to there customers to put back their harddrives to factory defualt formats, incase of problems.

:One more thing:
I just read about someone here who made the mac fat32 (32gb) then went into the pc and extended it to 120gb and it worked on the mac. what utilities did you use? manufacturer utilites or basic winxp disk management? or fdisk?

nick

any ideas? would using different utilities really make a difference?

for example.

i had to use maxtor tools to get windows to even see the harddrive and format it. but it wouldnt let me give it a permanent name, so i was then able to use seagates tools to give it a name and reformat it to fat32 (default settings). Would using disk management or fdisk be any different? would using those tools make it work on mac osx again?

Heres the response i got from seagate:

Hello.

In order to share the drive higher than 80Gb or a partition higher than
80Gb, you need to format it in the Mac OS extended format and use a third
party program on the PC side to read the data.

Sharing a high capacity drive between the Mac and PC is not stable in
partitions larger than 80Gb and it was only a matter of time before it
crashes.
This is the only resolution we have for the use of the External 160Gb in
both systems.

Edmond B.
Seagate Technical Support

SO:

I went ahead and formated the drive into 2 80gb partitions. Its more like 79.5gb and 80.5gb. The seagate or maxtor utilities wouldnt let me get exactly 80gb on each. Thats ok though.

Before i used seagate tool i checked it out on fdisk. The one big fat32 partition i had before, was saying it was "5fat32" dont know what that is, but that could be the reason it wasnt working on the mac.

After i reformated with the 2 80gb partitions, i went back to check it on fdisk, and this time each drive actually said "fat32", so hopefully it will work this monday on the mac :) all is looking good!

ncerniglia