External Hard Drive Not Being Picked Up

Plugged into a mates Mac and now can't detect on my lappy

[briggidere]

My mate borrowed my external harddrive the other day to do a backup and it's broken something.

It's a western digital 250 external drive.

I use a toshiba laptop but he uses a mac. Could this have changed some settings in the external drive so that my lappy isn't picking it up anymore?

Any help is appreciated.

[mack]

Is is a USB external drive? When you plug it in does anything happen?

Mack.

[briggidere]

Hi mack, thanks for the quick reply.

It's western digital USB external HD.

When i plug it in, it starts up but it's not detected as a drive in my computer. It does come up in the safely remove hardware and does show up in disk management.

It doesn't mention what the file system is in the disk management area or let me reformat from there.

Any ideas?

[mack]

I take it you cant access it from going to "My Computer" and seeing it as a device drive?

Also make sure other USB devices are able to run using the same USB port on your laptop.

I don't think there is any way for another system to alter the drive. The computer needs to accept the drive, not the other way around.

Unless the Mac has formated the drive with a file system that Windows cant use?

I take it you have tried a re-boot?

Mack.

[briggidere]

thanks mack,

there was a gpt protective partition which was stopping it being picked up.

I found the solution:

Type in “DiskPart” in command line.
Type in “list disk” in command line to show all disks in this machine.
Use “select” to set the focus to the specified partition, for example “select disk 1″.
Use “clean” command to remove GPT disk from the current in-focus disk by zeroing sectors.

There was nothing critical on the drive for myself so a reformat looked like the easiest way.

[mack]

Glad you where able to get it resolved, and thanks for sharing your solution. :)

Mack.