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

[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

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.

[f0dder]

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

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

[superboyac]

Here's the solution I used:  there's a free program called HFSExplorer.  It allows you to browse the contents of the  mac formatted drive and extract whatever files you need from it.  It worked great.