Data Recovery Mac Osx
External Hard drive not showing up in Vista?
My sister has an Acer Laptop Aspire 5720, I have a Macbook Pro late 2009 model, I bought a Western Digital 1TB hard drive a few months ago and backed up all my data and formatted for Mac OSX.
Now my sister is needing her laptop wiped clean to factory restore, which i can do with a partition recovery, but naturally she wanted to back up all her important files to my hard drive. However it doesn’t seem to be showing up in vista’s “My computer” section, The drivers are working it confirms in Computer management > Disk Management section and i can see the “Disk 1 931GB partition” However when i try to open it, the option is faded out.
this is because Vista does not recognise the Mac file format. Put the drive back onto the Mac, reduce the partition size to leave enough room to put your sisters data on, probably 50Gb is more than enough. On the Mac unallocate the “new” partition, so it has no file structure (in RAW format).
Now put the drive back into the Vista machine and it should see the drive, plus the 50Gb partition, and because it is unallocated you should be able to format the new piece of drive space (and not your Mac space). Format to NTFS, assign it drive letter if it does not already do so, without a drive letter it will still not be visible.
A tip for you, open Control Panel, go to Folder Options, in the view tab switch on the show hidden files and folders. Look in C: and you should see a file called OEM or Acer (they call it different things in different models) in the folder is another folder called Preload, this contains all the Acer drivers and software, back this up as well. If you cant get the laptop to boot using the Alt & F10 to access the hidden recovery factory reset options then you can at least get it somewhere near like new with the original drivers and software.
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