Windows will not recognize external hard drive

[buckdog05]

When I plug in a 320gb "Smart Drive" external hard drive to an Acer Aspire laptop, I can not get it to show up.

Sometimes Windows comes up with an error message reading "c:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe" at the top and saying below "the file does not have program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel."

Other times the error message doesn't come up, but when I go into "disk management," it says that the disk's space is "unallocated," and that it has a "EISA Configuration."

I can see the files on the hard drive on my Mac and it comes up no problem, and another external hard drive also won't show up on the Acer. My flash drive that I has worked perfectly with a number of computers, Windows and Mac also does not work, at least not all of the time. When I put it in now, I got the same error message and it is showing up as "removable disk" in Windows Explorer instead of coming up with the name that I have assigned to it. When I double click on it, I get an error that says "you need to format the disk in drive F: before you can use it."

I ran a scan with Malwarebytes on the Acer and checked to make sure that all of the file types that were in the root of the drive had a program associated with them.

Any suggestions, I'm stumped.

Thanks!

Edited December 23, 2009 by buckdog05

[SyntaxError]

OS X uses a different file system (HFS+) than Windows. That's the source of your problem.

This might work for you, as I understand HFS+ is just another name for the Ext2 file system. I could be wrong as I'm not a Mac or Linux user.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

It provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 with full access to Linux Ext2 volumes (read access and write access). This may be useful if you have installed both Windows and Linux as a dual boot environment on your computer.

The "Ext2 Installable File System for Windows" software is freeware.

If that's not correct, then maybe this would do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#Windows

On Windows, a fairly complete filesystem driver for HFS+ exists as a commercial software package called MacDrive. This package allows Windows users to read and write HFS+ formatted drives, and read Mac format optical disks.[11] Apple has released read-only HFS+ drivers for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 in Mac OS X 10.6.

A free alternative to MacDrive is HFSExplorer written by Erik Larsson. HFSExplorer is a useful application for viewing and extracting files from an HFS+ volume (Mac OS Extended) or an HFSX volume (Mac OS Extended, Case-sensitive) located either on a physical disk, on a .dmg disk image, or in a raw file system dump.

Edited December 23, 2009 by SyntaxError

[buckdog05]

OS X uses a different file system (HFS+) than Windows. That's the source of your problem.

This might work for you, as I understand HFS+ is just another name for the Ext2 file system. I could be wrong as I'm not a Mac or Linux user.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

It provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 with full access to Linux Ext2 volumes (read access and write access). This may be useful if you have installed both Windows and Linux as a dual boot environment on your computer.

The "Ext2 Installable File System for Windows" software is freeware.

If that's not correct, then maybe this would do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#Windows

On Windows, a fairly complete filesystem driver for HFS+ exists as a commercial software package called MacDrive. This package allows Windows users to read and write HFS+ formatted drives, and read Mac format optical disks.[11] Apple has released read-only HFS+ drivers for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 in Mac OS X 10.6.

A free alternative to MacDrive is HFSExplorer written by Erik Larsson. HFSExplorer is a useful application for viewing and extracting files from an HFS+ volume (Mac OS Extended) or an HFSX volume (Mac OS Extended, Case-sensitive) located either on a physical disk, on a .dmg disk image, or in a raw file system dump.

Thank you very much for your response, but the drive was actually originally used with Windows, I just plugged it into my Mac to test it.

The Mac will read, but not write files to the drive, leading me to believe that it is NTFS formatted. Sorry for not being more clear earlier!

[SyntaxError]

You're welcome.

Since it's formatted NTFS, I'd have to say based on my experience with a Seagate external, the MBR will become corrupted seemingly at random.

Try running some data recovery tools on it. I recommend GetDataBack NTFS. Not free, but worth the price if you need to recover important stuff.

Just be aware that good data recovery efforts take a very long time.