Cannot assign drive letter to my hard drive in Disk Management

[NovaGear G2]

Just now, unknownmiscreant said:

Sounds like a plan. Was the drive you are using originally in a mac? as macs use different file systems to windows, so the two are incompatible.

It was my dad's external hard drive, he used it for his Macbook all the time so he probably formatted it to work with his hard drive.

[unknownmiscreant]

5 minutes ago, NovaGear G2 said:

It was my dad's external hard drive, he used it for his Macbook all the time so he probably formatted it to work with his hard drive.

Yeah, get all the data off it onto a mac, then plug it back into your windows machine and run a diskpart clean command on it, to wipe all data and formatting.

[NovaGear G2]

1 minute ago, unknownmiscreant said:

Yeah, get all the data off it onto a mac, then plug it back into your windows machine and run a diskpart clean command on it, to wipe all data and formatting.

I was actually planning on doing it through the disk utility app on the Mac.

[unknownmiscreant]

8 minutes ago, NovaGear G2 said:

I was actually planning on doing it through the disk utility app on the Mac.

If you want to use the drive with windows, format it in windows. If you want to use it in mac, format it in mac. I don't know for sure, but I think that drives formatted for windows are compatible with mac, however you will get the best results with either operating system if the drive is formatted on that operating system.

[NovaGear G2]

Just now, unknownmiscreant said:

If you want to use the drive with windows, format it in windows. If you want to use it in mac, format it in mac. I don't know for sure, but I think that drives formatted for windows are compatible with mac, however you will get the best results with either operating system if the drive is formatted on that operating system.

I was gonna format it in exFAT or FAT32 in hopes that it will be detected by my computer, if it is then from there on my computer I'll format it to NTFS.

[unknownmiscreant]

2 minutes ago, NovaGear G2 said:

I was gonna format it in exFAT or FAT32 in hopes that it will be detected by my computer, if it is then from there on my computer I'll format it to NTFS.

 

Be aware, that fat32 does not allow files greater than 4gb and exfat only allows one file greater than 4gb. If you are going to reformat it, go NTFS, and see if the macs will work with it, if not, got exfat.

[NovaGear G2]

2 minutes ago, unknownmiscreant said:

 

Be aware, that fat32 does not allow files greater than 4gb and exfat only allows one file greater than 4gb. If you are going to reformat it, go NTFS, and see if the macs will work with it, if not, got exfat.

I know, I tried looking for NTFS but I couldn't find it in the dropdown menu for format. I'm hoping it'll be seen by my computer.

[NovaGear G2]

1 hour ago, unknownmiscreant said:

 

Be aware, that fat32 does not allow files greater than 4gb and exfat only allows one file greater than 4gb. If you are going to reformat it, go NTFS, and see if the macs will work with it, if not, got exfat.

Good news is that it worked. I was able to change the drive to NTFS, bad news is that, on the Mac I can't move the files from the back up drive to the new NTFS drive, probably because it's NTFS now, the other bad news is that the drive has no problem being able to be detected on my laptop but won't be seen by my desktop. Up until now I've been trying to get the drive to be able to be seen on my laptop which it wasn't before,assuming that if it is able to be seen on my laptop it should be able to be seen by my desktop. Unfortunately that is not the case now.

[Metal_Kitty]

if the partition is Mac  - then use a piece of software called Transmac to read the disk - as you are probably only going to use it once . the free trial (is a full version trial) should be fine...

Once in (need to run as admin) look for your drive in that - it will show up I promise. then browse through the files copy what you need and then do with the drive as you need to... 

Transmac - little blue exe download link near the top of the page - http://www.acutesystems.com/scrtm.htm

[Metal_Kitty]

this piece of software has saved my ass enough times that I bought a license for it... 
 

[Metal_Kitty]

oh and if you need to turn it back to the other partition format-  I would do that first before using transmac