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I got an external drive from a family member (who usually uses it with a Mac), and when I plug it into my computer nothing happens. A couple times (trying different USB slots), a dialog popped up installing a driver, but ultimately nothing showed up in either disk management or in windows explorer.

However, it does show up when I plug it in (and likewise, disappear when I unplug) in Device Manager.

My thoughts

  • It's not properly formatted to use on Windows
  • Maybe my USB slots are all 2.0 (though, device manager shows one with 3.0 in the name)?
  • I'm an idiot and overlooking something obvious

P.S., I closed out of "Computer Management" (by right-clicking "This PC" and clicking "Manage"), and now, when I reopen it, Disk Management sits and loads for forever. edit: When I unplugged the drive, disk management loaded immediately, showing this:

enter image description here

(E: is where .isos seem to mount, it won't open unless I have one mounted to it)

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My guess would be that it is not properly formatted for Windows. It's probably formatted in HFS+ if it was used for a Mac. The wording in your question makes it sound like it was used for Windows and Mac, but that does not seem to be the case.

Mac and Windows can both read/write to a FAT32 partition, but there are drawbacks to that. Such as FAT32 imposing a 4 GB file size limit. So this could cause an inconvenience for larger files. I also believe the largest FAT32 partition you can make in Windows is 32 GB. Windows purposely made this limit in order to encourage the use of NTFS.

The next problem is that Mac Snow Leopard, or higher, can read NTFS partitions but cannot write to the partition without using a third-party driver.

You simply need to reformat the disk on a Mac if you want to start using it for your Windows computer. If you want to keep any data that is on the external HDD, you'll want to store it locally on the Mac before you reformat. During the reformatting, make a FAT32 partition and then format it. Move any files you may want back onto the external HDD. After it is done formatting, you can plug it into your Windows machine and format it again to an NTFS partition. Again, before formatting to NTFS, move the files from the HDD onto your C: in Windows. You can then move them back onto the external HDD after formatting to NTFS is complete.

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  • Even though it's not formatted for Windows, it should still show up in Disk Management. I know that's the case with Linux and EXT2/3. The disk and its partitions show up, you can delete said partitions, but you can't open the disk or do anything else to the partitions. I'm fairly sure it's exactly the same principle for HFS+, where you should still be able to see the disk in disk management to delete the partitions.
    – Bilfred
    Commented Nov 22, 2015 at 7:15
  • @BilfredKerman I was thinking the same thing, but for some reason it is not. I decided to look into it more. A few sites say that you have to restart the PC after the driver is installed. Other suggestions were to uninstall the drivers through device manager for that disk and restart the PC. Here is one of the sites I was looking at.
    – DrZoo
    Commented Nov 22, 2015 at 7:58

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