Be Excellent To Each Other

Someone at work is having problems with an external hard drive. He wants to use it in a Mac at home and a PC at work but it's not being recognised by the PC.

I don't know what's happened but he thinks he's formatted it on the Mac and the PC won't recognise it.

Is there anything simple we can try?

He could copy the entire contents of it on to his Mac, while it's plugged in to the Mac.

Then format the drive as a PC filesystem, and copy it all back.

Or, there's software called TransMac that I've had some success with in the past, but I don't think it's supposed to be used as a permanent solution, more just a temporary fix. So he may be better off doing the other suggestion anyway.

Make sure when he formats it on the PC he formats it as FAT32 not NTFS, or the Mac won't be able to read it.

Yeah, he's probably formatted it as an HFS+ volume, which is the Mac file system and cannot be read by Windows. Ironically though, the FAT32 and NTFS file systems can be read by Macs (though IIRC NTFS can have some issues), so if he'd formatted it on the PC, he'd have been able to use it on both. I'd try Gaz's first suggestion of copying the contents on to the Mac, then reformatting the drive as a FAT32 or NTFS volume.

Edit: Craster up there disagrees with me about Macs being able to read NTFS and it's been a few years since I've been especially involved with Macs, so I'd take Craster's advice!

I think Macs can read NTFS but not write to it, or something similar.

Pretty sure Macs can read NTFS, they're just not so hot at writing to it.

But yeah, FAT32 should be the filesystem used.

How much data is he using? Personally I put all my shareable need docs and stuff in the cloud these days

They'll read from it but will refuse to write to it without extra software.

And in my experience, even with software, writing takes ages.

FAT32!