Hooked up FAT formatted drive in Vista; Not showing up.

Centauri

Centauri

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I had a 400GB Seagate ATA in another machine. I formatted it for FAT and loaded a bunch of files from my previous machine onto it as an easy way to get them all over to my Vista machine.

But once I hook the drive up, it doesn't appear as a volume in My Computer.

BIOS recognizes it. Vista loads a device driver for it on startup. Device Manager detects it.

What am I missing?
 
Go to Disk Management and give it a drive letter.

Start - and type diskmgmt.msc in the Search box, hit Enter, find the drive and right click on it, Change drive letter, and pick one to assign to it.

Simple.
 
Hmm... diskmgmt only sees the disk as unallocated space. Right clicking on it only presents me the option to initialize it, not assign a letter.

Yet if I put the drive in my Mac, it sees it as a FAT32/DOS drive and sees all of the drive's contents without issue.

*Sigh*
 
Might try accessing the disk using the Ultimate BootCD (www.ubcd4win.com) but you have to build the disk first. It would let you boot into a stripped down version of XP (WinPE - Windows Preinstallation Environment) and run Explorer - then do a simple file copy to your drive or partition of choice.

There's something about Vista that it doesn't "see" partitions on drives sometimes that are attached after Vista in installed. I'm not calling it a problem, I'm just saying that in my own experience with Vista so far, sometimes I'll attach an external USB/Firewire drive, USB stick, etc and Vista can't "see" it even though I know it has data on it, is formated properly and should be easily usable by Vista.

Weird...
 
What I thought about doing was just formatting the drive in Windows for FAT, putting it in my Mac, then doing the file transfer, and then putting it back in the PC.

Would that work?

I can't believe how difficult this is. I'm remembering why I left Windows years ago. Jeeze...

Not to mention the fact that MacDrive doesn't work with Vista x64.
 
Don't format the drive, otherwise the contents will be a bigger pain to recover than they probably already are. I'd recommend using a boot CD as well. Another option would be linux live CD, like knoppix.
 
You need to "intialize" the disk first...
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/aad48fb0-069a-4a5d-8cad-6be0fdec01091033.mspx
I can't find why... but I've done it a few times on drives that I've moved from one PC to another and used as a data drive.
And your data will still be on it. You said it yourself that's the option that comes up. Click it.

And a word of advice: keep the comments judging one OS to another to yourself, I don't go into your computer and make fun of what it is running or what it's holding at the pier...
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Might try accessing the disk using the Ultimate BootCD (www.ubcd4win.com) but you have to build the disk first. It would let you boot into a stripped down version of XP (WinPE - Windows Preinstallation Environment) and run Explorer - then do a simple file copy to your drive or partition of choice.

There's something about Vista that it doesn't "see" partitions on drives sometimes that are attached after Vista in installed. I'm not calling it a problem, I'm just saying that in my own experience with Vista so far, sometimes I'll attach an external USB/Firewire drive, USB stick, etc and Vista can't "see" it even though I know it has data on it, is formated properly and should be easily usable by Vista.

Weird...
Click to expand...

Funny you mention that: I just plugged in a new 4GB USB stick and Vista Home Premium was "unable to install the device driver" and it does not show up as one of my drives. I have two external USB HDs (FreeAgent and MyBook) that mounted straight out of the box.

Edit: Just unplugged it and plugged it back in and Vista recognized it as the Kingston Data Traveler, which it is. Weird.
 
Todd said:
Funny you mention that: I just plugged in a new 4GB USB stick and Vista Home Premium was "unable to install the device driver" and it does not show up as one of my drives. I have two external USB HDs (FreeAgent and MyBook) that mounted straight out of the box.

Edit: Just unplugged it and plugged it back in and Vista recognized it as the Kingston Data Traveler, which it is. Weird.
Click to expand...

I will say that Vista has shown me some strange behavior with flash drives... unplug/replug amazingly fixes most of it, but strange none the less.
 
Grimmda said:
You need to "intialize" the disk first...
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/aad48fb0-069a-4a5d-8cad-6be0fdec01091033.mspx
I can't find why... but I've done it a few times on drives that I've moved from one PC to another and used as a data drive.
And your data will still be on it. You said it yourself that's the option that comes up. Click it.
Click to expand...

That didn't do anything either.

Now it just shows up in diskmgmt as online but the space on it still appears as unallocated. And I still can't access it through My Computer.
 
And I think at that point in Disk Management you need to assign a letter to it... then open it in my computer.
 
How?

Right clicking on it only presents me with "Properties", "Help" and "New Simple Volume"
 
Okay, I went through the New Simple Volume wizard which allows you assign a drive letter. I told it not to format the drive. I clicked Finish, the drive was assigned the letter I selected.

It now shows up in My Computer. But when I attempt to access it I am asked if I want to Format it...

Jeeze.
 
Centauri said:
I had a 400GB Seagate ATA in another machine. I formatted it for FAT and loaded a bunch of files from my previous machine onto it as an easy way to get them all over to my Vista machine.

But once I hook the drive up, it doesn't appear as a volume in My Computer.

BIOS recognizes it. Vista loads a device driver for it on startup. Device Manager detects it.

What am I missing?
Click to expand...

Clearly this drive will not be viewable in it's current state on your Vista PC.

I looked back at your original post and it appears that you want to move data from one PC to your new Vista PC. The problem is your formated it in FAT...

FAT has a limit of 32GB so I'm curious how you formated it in 400GB size. You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463

Use NTFS and it should solve your problems. Go back, reformat it in NTFS, than copy the data you want to move to it and hook it up onto your Vista PC and it should work. Try that and let us know.
 
I'm unaware of any such FAT size limitation. I had 60-80GB~ drives formatted in FAT in an old Windows 98 system. That limit, according to Wiki, appears only when formatting for FAT during XP's setup. If bringing in a drive that has been formatted for FAT from another source, it works fine.

What I'm trying to do is move data from my Mac to my PC. I formatted the drive in OS X's Disk Utility for FAT32 and transfered over 300GBs worth of data.

I used this method before, though the last time I did it I was dealing with XP and not with Vista.

I even tried to do this in reverse this morning; Format the drive for FAT in Vista, bring it to the Mac and then bring it back to the Vista PC. But Vista apparently doesn't support FAT formatting whatsoever.
 
The reason I'm not using NTFS, BTW, is that OS X is only capable of reading from but not writing to it.
 
Ahhh ok, those are the important type of details that were missing in the first place.

Yeah FAT is your best bet. I've read/heard that FAT partitions on external hard drives that are plugged in and unplugged have issues and lead to easy corruption. Might want to use the "safe to disconnect" option in XP when you want to hotswap that drive out of XP if you ever get it to work.

Good luck with this as I didn't realize how much of a Mac & Vista compatability problem this is. What I know about a Mac won't help in this situation, sorry I'm out of ideas. Good luck.
 
Grimmda said:
Clearly this drive will not be viewable in it's current state on your Vista PC.

I looked back at your original post and it appears that you want to move data from one PC to your new Vista PC. The problem is your formated it in FAT...

FAT has a limit of 32GB so I'm curious how you formated it in 400GB size. You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463

Use NTFS and it should solve your problems. Go back, reformat it in NTFS, than copy the data you want to move to it and hook it up onto your Vista PC and it should work. Try that and let us know.
Click to expand...

you sir are incorrect the correct size for fat 32 limitation was around 120 gigabytes at the time. Anymore and you would have to pull a partition magic on these drives. After the adven of windows xp sp2 did the limitation for fat lifted, but i dont think it could go up to 400gb though.
 
Grimmda said:
Ahhh ok, those are the important type of details that were missing in the first place.

Yeah FAT is your best bet. I've read/heard that FAT partitions on external hard drives that are plugged in and unplugged have issues and lead to easy corruption. Might want to use the "safe to disconnect" option in XP when you want to hotswap that drive out of XP if you ever get it to work.

Good luck with this as I didn't realize how much of a Mac & Vista compatability problem this is. What I know about a Mac won't help in this situation, sorry I'm out of ideas. Good luck.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your efforts. I appreciate it.
 
purple_haze said:
you sir are incorrect the correct size for fat 32 limitation was around 120 gigabytes at the time. Anymore and you would have to pull a partition magic on these drives. After the adven of windows xp sp2 did the limitation for fat lifted, but i dont think it could go up to 400gb though.
Click to expand...

I'm wondering if I should just format my drive into a bunch of 30GB~ partitions and then try the file transfer that way?
 
purple_haze said:
you sir are incorrect the correct size for fat 32 limitation was around 120 gigabytes at the time.
Click to expand...

Centauri said:
Thanks for your efforts. I appreciate it.
Click to expand...

Yeah it's funny I didn't read my own thread, I said it myself that it was a limitation of the system partition only... HAHA oops.

And

Maybe you want to go post this in the Apple Products Forum in case someone there doesn't come into this forum.:
http://www.hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=74
 
Isn't there a program for Macs that allows you to write to NTFS partitions? I know that what you said about not being able to write, only read NTFS was true but I thought there was a free, third party software for it.

Also, I have heard that Vista has problems with reading FAT format disks and Vista x64 is even more of a PITA. Is there any way that you can network the two computers and do a simple network share of the available folders and then cross them over? (sorry not proficient in MAC to PC networking). Check with the guys in the Apple forum and I am sure they will have something for you.
 
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