I purchased the 1 TB Backup Plus Portable Slim External Drive. It works just fine with my Mac. I've tried 3 separate Windows machines now, a brand new Lenovo, an older Sony Vaio, and a year old Dell, and this driver absolutely refuses to install on ANY of those Windows machines (2 Windows 7, and 1 Windows 10). I used it on the Mac first, but it's maybe 2 months old now and has less than 10% used. It gave me the exact same issue on all 3 of the Windows machines, it will not recognize the device AT all, I can see it in there, when I look in Disk Management, but there is not any letter assigned to it, and if I attempt to right click and format or do anything to the device, everything is greyed out. I cannot access the files on the drive, and if I attempt to update the driver, it tells me Windows has already allocated the best driver for the device.
This volume format accommodates Mac OS X and Mac files the best. Give the drive one FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition, which both Mac OS X and Windows can read and write. This is a good place to put files that you want both Mac and Windows to have read/write access to. Seagate Media for Windows 10 Free The Seagate Media app gives you access to all the photos, videos, music, and documents stored on your compatible Seagate storage devices.
I don't really feel like reformatting it, that would completely defeat the purpose to me. If I'm going to have to back up that entire drive somewhere else, I might as well just have to purchase another one and have 2 of them, one for the Mac and one for the Windows machine.
And Seagate should disclose that the external drive is only compatible with ONE O/S or the other.not with both.:-/ Oh, and I DID contact Seagate, registered my product with them and everything, and that's a serious waste of time. They make it almost impossible to get through to their customer service, and if you do manage to get through to someone, they don't bother to read anything that you write in your trouble ticket. You have to pay to be able to resolve anything to speak with someone on the phone. They do offer to attempt to solve it with you over e-mail, but it would be a very tedious process and the e-mail response team isn't capable of anything beyond a level One support.
There are utilities which permit HFS+ (Mac filesystem) access on Windows. This one goes for about $20. (similar software is also available to go the other way: Macs by default can READ Windows disks but not WRITE to them, and a utility like the above except for Mac allows full read and write access) So I'm guessing by default, since I was ignorant and plugged the Seagate into the Mac first, either the Seagate by default or I unknowingly made selections to format the drive to a Mac type of file system which is why it's not being recognized by the Windows machine. So even if I were to purchase the application you suggested, that would only fix my problem in the future, right?
I would still have to either find somewhere with enough space to backup EVERYthing on that drive, erase it all, but the $20 app, start from scratch with the app on the Mac and start with a blank Seagate, right? Or will having that app immediately force the Seagate to be formatted to HFS so it's readable by the Windows machine? One would think this would be a standard/common issue that Seagate would have addressed a long time ago?? Thank you very much for your explanation and suggestion. If the drive was recognized right away by the Mac but not the Windows systems, it must have been pre-formatted with the HFS+ filesystem.
A computer (Mac or Windows) won't format a blank drive or reformat an already formatted drive without first prompting the user (unless there's some data-destroying malware at work or something). To verify the filesystem, plug it into the Mac and control-click on the drive's desktop icon, and select 'get info.' As far as the last question, that software won't affect the format of the drive or reformat it. All it will do is install support for Windows to understand a Mac formatted drive. There are other filesystems which can be used by both Mac and PC, like ExFAT. This is a storage filesystem with support built into both OSes, however if the drive is currently HFS+ you'd have to back up all the data elsewhere, format the drive and transfer it back on.
An ExFat drive out of the box would fulfill Seagate's promise though if that drive were ExFat it should be understood by the Windows systems.
'I get a new Western digital hard drive and want to use it as an external disk to save working files. But I don't know how to format it since I should frequently switch from a PC to a Macbook. Can you tell me how to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC compatibility so that I can easily access or transfer my stuff between the two operating system?' Overview of External Hard Drive Formatting for Mac and PC As we all know, Mac and Windows use different file systems by default. So, if you frequently use both a PC and a Mac computer and want to share an external drive between the two operating system for data backup or transfer, you need to make it compatible with Mac and PC first. But how can you format the external hard drive for Mac & PC?
What is the best file system that makes external hard drive compatible with both PC and Mac What is the best file system that supported by both PC and Mac? Actually, many users have some doubts on this question. If you are one of them, you can choose FAT32 or exFAT in your case. Advantages of the FAT32 file system: FAT32 is not only compatible with Mac and Windows but also many gaming and Linux OSs. Disadvantages of the FAT32 file system: 1. Single files larger than 4GB on the external hard drive is not supported by FAT32.
Mac OS X's Time Machine backup utility won't work with FAT32. How to Format an External Hard Drive to fat32 for Mac and PC If you ignored all the disadvantages and decided to format your external hard drive to FAT32, you might need a third-party software for help when the disk is larger than 32GB. You know, Windows Disk Management utility completely cannot help at this moment. Here, you can try EaseUS, a program allows you to format the Western Digital hard drive, Seagate hard drive, Toshiba hard drive, etc to FAT32 in Windows 10/8/7/XP/Vista with simple steps.