Reformatting a Mac drive for XP...HOW if XP can't see it???

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jmoose
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Reformatting a Mac drive for XP...HOW if XP can't see it???

Post by jmoose » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:15 pm

Subject says it all!

About a week ago one of my clients handed me a freshly wiped Lacie firewire drive that was Mac formatted so we could have all the 2" 24-track takes dumped into a DAW and walk away with files.

We left the studio with 'em on my drive but I need to get 'em on HIS drive and my XP machine isn't really recognizing his Mac drive, so I gotta reformat it I guess...

But how???

The drive isn't showing up on any of the drive lists in "my computer" or any of the programs, BUT...it IS showing up in the firewire port with the same kind of recognition that say, a USB flash drive gets. I can "stop" it ('ya with me?) but I can't do any work with that stoopid Mac drive.

At least my PC drive shows up on his Mac! Buwhahahahahaha!

I've already asked my client for advice...he's got none.

HELP!

Much thanks in advance!
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digitaldrummer
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Post by digitaldrummer » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:44 pm

does it show up in Administrative Tools-->Computer Managment-->Disk management?

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Post by John Jeffers » Sun Oct 29, 2006 6:24 pm

If you don't want to reformat it, get a copy of MacDrive. That will let you use Mac formatted disks on a PC.

If you do decide to reformat the disk in Windows, make sure to use FAT instead of NTFS. Macs can read NTFS, but they can't write to it.

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Post by jmoose » Mon Oct 30, 2006 8:33 am

digitaldrummer wrote:does it show up in Administrative Tools-->Computer Managment-->Disk management?
Ooooo.

I hadn't thought of that...I'll have to see...

But yah, no...I need this drive to show up on a PC without headaches or workarounds like MacDrive if at all possible. The singer/B3 player is on the Mac but both me and the guitar player who's doing comps (at his house) are on PC DAW's.

Reformatting isn't a problem. That's what I wanna do!!!
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Post by jmoose » Mon Oct 30, 2006 9:48 am

Ok.

I can see the drive in "disk management" but it's showing up as an "unknown" volume, not installed and not allocated.

But it can see that it's a 250gig drive...

How the fuk do I format this?!?

AGGGGHHH.


:twisted:


:roll:

Sorry...this is gonna start holding up the workflow and I'm getting fustrated.

Thanks again.
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Post by sonikbliss » Mon Oct 30, 2006 11:50 am

If you have a mac nearby just hook it up to that and reformat it for PC on the mac. FAT32 is the way to go. Either that or just burn the sessions tsome dvds and give them to whoever needs them and they can copy them to their hard drives. It's a good idea to have a "hard" copy anyways.

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Post by John Jeffers » Mon Oct 30, 2006 12:02 pm

jmoose wrote:Ok.

I can see the drive in "disk management" but it's showing up as an "unknown" volume, not installed and not allocated.

But it can see that it's a 250gig drive...

How the fuk do I format this?!?
Right-click on the Unknown volume and select Format.

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Post by jmoose » Mon Oct 30, 2006 12:05 pm

Thanks for the advice so far...

I was mucking around in disk management and figured out how to format the drive so NOW Windows can see it!

:D :D :D


But!

(...man do I ever hate buts...)

Apparently the only format option is NTFS...FAT32 isn't on the dropdown menu. So now I'm wondering how to format the drive to be FAT32 and not NTFS.

And yeah...the raw multi-tracks have already been backed up to DVD plus we still have 'em all scattered out across several reels of 2" tape at 15ips. The guitar player wants to comp takes together on his PC & singer/B3 guy needs to be able to connect the stuff to his Mac for overdubs when the comps are done, and I get to keep track of it all & mix. So the drive thing is pretty paramount to being able to being able to have forward momentum right now...
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Post by John Jeffers » Mon Oct 30, 2006 12:26 pm

You probably have to delete the existing unknown partition first. Read this for more info:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310525/

There's a step-by-step guide in there on creating and formatting new partitions in WinXP.

EDIT: No, this doesn't work either. I just tried it with my 200GB removable drive. It only lets me choose NTFS. I'm looking for a workaround now.

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Post by John Jeffers » Mon Oct 30, 2006 12:53 pm

Never mind, WinXP won't let you format anything bigger than 32GB as FAT32. You'll need a 3rd party partition manager (Partition Magic, for example), or maybe a Win98/ME boot disk to format it as FAT32. You learn something new every day.

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Post by jmoose » Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:00 pm

John Jeffers wrote:Never mind, WinXP won't let you format anything bigger than 32GB as FAT32. You'll need a 3rd party partition manager (Partition Magic, for example), or maybe a Win98/ME boot disk to format it as FAT32. You learn something new every day.
Huh!

Damn.

So maybe I should try something like a Maxtor install disc that I got with another drive?

I guess I'll figure it out from here on my own...

Thanks everybody!
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Post by housepig » Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:30 pm

google the Ultimate Boot CD - it's a bootable cd containing tons of useful applications for repair, recovery and configuring pcs. and it's all free.

my first attempt would be to get that, boot, and see if one of the disk-formatting apps will see and work with your drive.
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Post by spankenstein » Mon Oct 30, 2006 4:56 pm

Can you do multiple partition of < 32GB in size?

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Post by jmoose » Mon Oct 30, 2006 5:31 pm

spankenstein wrote:Can you do multiple partition of < 32GB in size?
That might really suck to work with...






(still hunting for the Maxtor CD...)
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Post by digitaldrummer » Mon Oct 30, 2006 5:51 pm

I haven't tried it in awhile but I'm pretty sure you can format a FAT32 volume greater than 32GB. Delete the partition, make sure you create a primary partition. then format. If you are still limited, you may need to change the allocation unit size option to something larger than the default. this basically sets the smallest unit of storage on the disk (every file, even if 1 byte will use up this much space). large allocation units are generally OK for audio as we are usually not dealing with tiny files.

Mike

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