WinXP wont read ntfs or fat partition from mac hard drive...?

[partyplanet]

Hi,

I have a Seagate 2 TB usb external hard drive that I use for karaoke on my macbook pro. I now need to access that song library on a PC tower running WinXp Pro. I created a large partition on the drive, formated as FAT (so both could read it), but the PC only recognized it under device manager, not as a hardrive. I then reformated the partition to NTFS, but got the same result.

Device manager sees the drive as " Seagate desktop USB device" with MBR filesys and 0 space unallocated.
Disk manager reads it as a blank drive with "GPT protective partition"

wtf

 

[fantastik250]

I suggest going to someone who has a mac and grab your file from there. Because it's a protective partition, you need to re-format it. It is formatted as a linux partition instead of a windows partition.

Make sure you back up your data. Follow these steps indicated in the link:
http://blog.paulgu.com/windows/delete-gpt-protective-partition/

 

[Boomer83]

Did you get it to work?

 

[partyplanet]

Thanks for the input, I still have the macbook, I made the new partition to allow the pc to run my mac's karaoke library, and I was trying to avoid buying a 2nd hard drive (I kinda thought the 2TB would be the last one I bought for this decade, lol)

Yeah, I figured the sub system on the HD was linux or mac-only. hmmm. if I can save my data elsewhere , can I reformat the whole disk as ntfs, and THEN make a partition for HFS? (the reverse of what im trying now)

 

[fantastik250]

Well, it might be easier just to make the NTFS and split it. Not sure if it will allow HFS.

 

[Boomer83]

Post #5 on this page may help you out.

http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/38610-gpt-guid-partition-table.html

 

[partyplanet]

Fantastik250: does this mean if I start over with a MBR format (using ntfs or fat) that I can then partition off a HFS section for my mac?

Boomer83: good info, but it seems he used Ubuntu to change flags. I dont have this.

 

[Boomer83]

I don't really understand why this doesn't work. You made the right choice (FAT32 will work fine for both). When it was FAT32, did you ever assign it a drive letter in Manage -> Storage?

 

[fantastik250]

I am not too familiar with mac partitions, but try it. You can have it split and make a logical partition for mac. MBR is universal so, I think it should work.

 

[partyplanet]

It seems WinXP doesn't recognize the subsystem/partition table of the mac-formated drive, regardless of the partition format. If I had originally formatted the drive as FAT, it would've been fine. Once I find a place to park my data, I will try 1st
reformat NTFS , with HFS partition.
Then I will try FAT and see if they both read. I will post results here for future reference.

I'm mostly just annoyed that iPartition did not warn me of this when I chose to create an unrecognizable table/partition/filesys path. Its like I paid a translator to help me talk to someone in China, and they just said "pong tow book wong gooey" and took my $. lol

 

[fantastik250]

Lol, I know how you feel