XP and external hard drive, help!

gwik

New Member
Hello, everybody. I'm about to pull my hair out over my futile attempts to get a LaCie external hard drive to work on Windows XP. I would greatly appreciate someone's help.

I purchased the hard drive to work with video footage and gave it to a friend who was helping me. He was using a Mac and when he returned the drive, he said I'd need to reformat it for the PC. I plugged the drive in and right away, according to disk manager, my computer recognizes the drive and says it's working properly. However, it has no drive letter assigned and doesn't show up in "My Computer." As a result, I can't save anything to the drive.

Here's the kicker: the Windows help guide says to go to the drive in disk manager and right-click, at which point a drop-down menu of options comes up, including "format" and "change drive letter and path." Unfortunately, all of those options except for "delete partition" are in gray and unavailable for me to acivate.

I'm listed as the administrator and it's a home computer, so it shouldn't be a password problem. Any ideas? I'm new to this and fairly computer illiterate, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 
Mac and Windows use two totally different formats and they don't recongnize each other. While windows is seeing what type of drive it is because of the different formatting it will not be able to see or use the drive until you format it for windows. Deleting the partion should delete all information on the hard drive including the Mac formatting. From there you should be able to reformat it for windows.
 
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