I copied some data from my mac to my external drive (I didn’t use the smartware thing, just dragged items to copy). I didn’t lock the drive and haven’t used Smartware at all). I need to access the data on the drive from a PC, but when I connect it to the PC, all I see is the SmartWare stuff. How do I get to my data?
To share data on both Mac and PC computers you need to do these steps below:
Take the drive an plug it back to the Mac computer.
Note: Re-partition the drive will erase all data. Please back up first.
Go to Disk Utility.
Choose the “Partition”
Under “Options” choose “Master Boot Record”
Under Format " choose “MS-DOS (FAT)”
click “Apply” and “Partition”
The drive is now Formatted with Master Boot Record.
It can be read/write from both Mac and PC computers.
This resolves my question but it doesn’t solve my problem, lol.
I no longer have the machine (Mac) from which I did the backups. So I’m going to need to borrow someone’s Mac to backup the backups on the external drive before I format it so that it now works on PCs; kinda defeating the purpose of having bought an external drive for backups in the first place. Anyhoo, I’ll stick to LaCie drives from now on. I can just plug-and-play those to both Macs and PCs.
Thanks for the info!