[M_Vallee]

I'm in crisis mode right now. I was re-formatting a hard drive to be FAT32 so I could use it to go between Mac and Windows. It went smoothly and I moved some files onto the hard drive, 230GB of them. Well that was yesterday since then I’ve switched the hard drive in the enclosure and re-formatted another hard drive, which also worked fine. I did this on my MacBook.

Today I hooked up the first hard drive again and I got an error message that said, “the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer” it asks me to initialize, ignore or eject. I tried it in Windows and it says "This drive is not yet formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

Where did all my files go???? Why in the disk management does it not show the partition anymore? And is it possible to get them back? I haven’t done anything to it yet.

I have no clue what caused this.

Any help would be really appreciated. This is a lot of info to lose and I really need it back.

[Neil Jones]

IIRC Windows cannot read files from a drive that has been formatted on a Mac.

According to one Google poster, one resolution was to format your external drive in FAT16 format, which XP can read but there's no support for XP to format it in FAT16. Alternatively third party software will be needed such as MacDrive: http://www.vnunet.co...186731/macdrive

[M_Vallee]

It was formatted using a Mac but formatted to FAT32 filesystem so that it can work on BOTH Windows and Mac. I've done it with 5 harddrives and all of them have worked fine.

This one won't load all of a sudden on either mac or windows.