Made partition on external hd with windows 7 now can't use with mac

[faro_11]

Hello,
I have a Seagate external HD that was connected to a iMac (running Mac OS X) at my office. I plugged it into my windows 7 laptop, which didn't assign a drive to it, and I ended up using computer management to make a partition on the drive and assign it a "E:\" drive. Windows 7 still wouldn't access the files until I formatted the HD, so I plugged it back into the Mac and it was no longer accessible. The mac won't mount it and I can't acess the files.

Anyone have any idea how I can access the files on the drive/restore everything back to normal without losing any data? There's some really important stuff on there that I'd be in big trouble over if it was lost :\

Thanks for the help in advance.

 

[pjmelect]

The Mac and the PC use completely different file formats and will not be able to understand each others disks. Fat32 is a format that both the Mac and the PC should understand. If you format your disk in Fat32 you should be aware of some limitations, the maximum files size is 4 Gig, the maximum disk size is 132Gig and if you use Windows XP installation disk to format the disk the limit is 32 Gig.
The format of the Mac and PC boot sector is also different and you will need to use a Mac utility to repair this.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

you have already lost the data...dont you know what happens when you repartition or format something....maybe you should read up on the subject before you go playing with things you dont know about.

 

[pjmelect]

He has not necessarily lost his data but it is not looking good. I would agree that he needs to get the help of someone more knowledgeable if he stands any chance of recovering his data. He should try a Mac forum as my knowledge of the Mac is limited.

 

[faro_11]

I never actually formatted it, just named the partition (so windows sees it as a "RAW" file system). I guess windows added a boot sector in the process when this happened (it was instant, it didn't really go through the drive/data).

thanks for the help so far, i'm going to try mac forums.. if any one else has any ideas, they're much appreciated. thank you.