How do I get my PC to recognize my Apple-formatted external hard drive?

July 16, 2007 11:09 AM

How do I get my PC to recognize my Apple-formatted external hard drive?

I use Super Duper on my Macbook to backup my files, and I have it set up to make the backup bootable. Now I want to copy 60 GB of MP3 files from the external hard drive to my PC laptop (as another backup and to use at work).

When I plug the drive (USB portable) into my PC, it recognizes it but it doesn't appear as a drive letter in My Computer.

Any tips?

posted by kdern to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

your drive is probably formatted as HFS+, which is not by default readable by XP. i think there's a program called "Macdrive" that allows you to do this, but I haven't tried it.

My solution was to format my external as Fat32, which is readable/writable by both operating systems.
posted by sharkfu at 11:16 AM on July 16, 2007

There's MacDrive , as sharkfu mentioned, which costs dinero, but allows HFS+ formatted drives to appear as drive letters in windows.

For more basic needs, there's the free HFS Explorer, which only allows you to 'extract' files from HFS+ drives, not write to them. That sounds like all you need in this situation.
posted by boaz at 12:16 PM on July 16, 2007

Best answer: You can download a full working trial of MacDrive for free. So just downlod/install that, restar, do your copying and then uninstall when you're done. Other than the restarting part, It's so much more seamless than any other tool.
posted by sammich at 1:30 PM on July 16, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for the tips... I'm using MacDrive's demo now and it works flawlessly. Just what I needed (but I wish it was free).
posted by kdern at 1:33 PM on July 16, 2007

Just thinking that if you might be doing this regularly, you could go the opposite way and use an NTFS drive connected to your mac via MacFuze. I've never used it, cannot vouch for ease-of-use, don't even know if that's how it's spelt.
posted by joshnunn at 4:58 AM on July 23, 2007