Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Does initializing a USB hard drive format the data (in XP)?

(1/2) > >>

superboyac:
I have a USB hard drive with a video that someone put on it for me.  On his end, he connected the drive using a Mac, if that makes a difference.  Anyway, when i plug it into my XP computer, no drive letter shows up.  The drive is in the computer management area and shows up as a drive that is not initialized.  If I initialize it, do I automatically lose the data on it?  Or is that just a step I have to do for the drive letter to be assigned?

f0dder:
"Initializing" means writing a partition table, and is usually followed by formatting. If you do this, you'll fsck up the mac filesystem (HPFS+, I think?), so definitely don't do this :)

superboyac:
"Initializing" means writing a partition table, and is usually followed by formatting. If you do this, you'll fsck up the mac filesystem (HPFS+, I think?), so definitely don't do this :)
-f0dder (October 07, 2009, 02:30 PM)
--- End quote ---
darn.  i'll have to use something like macdrive.  thanks.

4wd:
You could always get your friend to reformat the drive as FAT32 to be more compatible with pretty much any OS.

lanux128:
in the (g)olden days of floppy disk, a lot of people had the same problem. using mac-formatted floppies on windows PC. :)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page