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Main Area and Open Discussion => General Software Discussion => Topic started by: superboyac on October 07, 2009, 12:06 PM

Title: Does initializing a USB hard drive format the data (in XP)?
Post by: superboyac on October 07, 2009, 12:06 PM

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?

Title: Re: Does initializing a USB hard drive format the data (in XP)?
Post by: f0dder on October 07, 2009, 02:30 PM

"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 :)

Title: Re: Does initializing a USB hard drive format the data (in XP)?
Post by: superboyac on October 07, 2009, 03:26 PM

"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)

darn.  i'll have to use something like macdrive.  thanks.

Title: Re: Does initializing a USB hard drive format the data (in XP)?
Post by: 4wd on October 08, 2009, 02:16 AM

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

Title: Re: Does initializing a USB hard drive format the data (in XP)?
Post by: lanux128 on October 08, 2009, 03:35 AM

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

Title: Re: Does initializing a USB hard drive format the data (in XP)?
Post by: f0dder on October 08, 2009, 04:21 AM

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

-4wd (October 08, 2009, 02:16 AM)

Just keep in mind that you then can't have files larger than 2³²-1 bytes on the drive.

Title: Re: Does initializing a USB hard drive format the data (in XP)?
Post by: superboyac on October 08, 2009, 10:25 AM

Here's the solution I used:  there's a free program called HFSExplorer (http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html).  It allows you to browse the contents of the  mac formatted drive and extract whatever files you need from it.  It worked great.