[the_constructor[_2_]]

I have been building a computer up from parts donated.

I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or
thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections. The
first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I then used
the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.

I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon
booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said it
was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device Manager.

The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so the
question is, "Where has my drive gone".

Jim

[Adrian C]

On 30/01/2011 16:01, the_constructor wrote:
I have been building a computer up from parts donated.

I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or
thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections. The
first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I then used
the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.

I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon
booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said it
was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device Manager.

The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so the
question is, "Where has my drive gone".

Jim

Probably needs either a format or a drive letter assigning. Have a look
in disk administrator.

--
Adrian C

[Appelation Controlee]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 16:01:29 -0000, "the_constructor"
wrote:

I have been building a computer up from parts donated.

I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or
thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections. The
first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I then used
the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.

I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon
booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said it
was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device Manager.

The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so the
question is, "Where has my drive gone".

What do you see in the disk manager?

[Ron Lowe[_3_]]

On 30/01/2011 16:01, the_constructor wrote:
I have been building a computer up from parts donated.

I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or
thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections. The
first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I then used
the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.

I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon
booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said it
was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device Manager.

The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so the
question is, "Where has my drive gone".

Jim



Start - Run - Type 'diskmgmt.msc' ( without the quotes )into the box and
hit enter.

Find the drive there, and see how it's described.
R-click the drive gives options to format and assign a drive letter.

--
Ron

[Tabby]

On Jan 30, 4:01*pm, "the_constructor"
wrote:
I have been building a computer up from parts donated.

I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or
thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections. The
first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I then used
the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.

I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon
booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said it
was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device Manager.

The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so the
question is, "Where has my drive gone".

Jim

Use a decent OS and you dont have all this going on. Try ubuntu if P4,
Antix or Puppy if older, and DSL if it doesnt have 128M ram.


NT

[Adrian C]

On 30/01/2011 17:24, Tabby wrote:

Use a decent OS and you dont have all this going on. Try ubuntu if P4,
Antix or Puppy if older, and DSL if it doesnt have 128M ram.


Yup. Quite simple in Linux,

Just open up a terminal window, open a su shell, do a fdisk -l, mount -t
/dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3, and symlink that to somewhere more friendly or do
tar -xjfv ~/gparted-0.7.1.tar.bz2, ./configure, make, make check, make
install, run gparted, select disk, select partition, and format... In
case you get stuck, have another net connected PC standing by to spend
the rest of your life googling arcane error messages that apply
specially to one distribution and release and not the next.

:-|

--
Adrian C

[John Williamson]

Adrian C wrote:
On 30/01/2011 17:24, Tabby wrote:

Use a decent OS and you dont have all this going on. Try ubuntu if P4,
Antix or Puppy if older, and DSL if it doesnt have 128M ram.


Yup. Quite simple in Linux,

Just open up a terminal window, open a su shell, do a fdisk -l, mount -t
/dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3, and symlink that to somewhere more friendly or do
tar -xjfv ~/gparted-0.7.1.tar.bz2, ./configure, make, make check, make
install, run gparted, select disk, select partition, and format... In
case you get stuck, have another net connected PC standing by to spend
the rest of your life googling arcane error messages that apply
specially to one distribution and release and not the next.

:-|

Or just boot from the Gparted live CDand tell it how you want the HD
partitioned and formatted. That's what I do. To quote a certain
meerkat:- "Seemples"

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

[Colonel Edmund J. Burke[_12_]]

"the_constructor" wrote in message
news
I have been building a computer up from parts donated.

I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or
thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections.
The first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I then
used the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.

I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon
booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said it
was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device Manager.

The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so
the question is, "Where has my drive gone".

Jim


If you had a real job, you would not have the time to waste playing with
dimestore computer parts.

[Steve Firth]

the_constructor wrote:

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine.

That's a logical impossibility.

[Adrian C]

On 30/01/2011 18:47, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Adrian C wrote:

On 30/01/2011 17:24, Tabby wrote:

Use a decent OS and you dont have all this going on. Try ubuntu if P4,
Antix or Puppy if older, and DSL if it doesnt have 128M ram.


Yup. Quite simple in Linux,

Just open up a terminal window, open a su shell, do a fdisk -l, mount
-t /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3, and symlink that to somewhere more friendly or
do tar -xjfv ~/gparted-0.7.1.tar.bz2, ./configure, make, make check,
make install, run gparted, select disk, select partition, and
format... In case you get stuck, have another net connected PC
standing by to spend the rest of your life googling arcane error
messages that apply specially to one distribution and release and not
the next.

Oh, don't they have Disk Utility in Linux then? I just plug it in, click
format, give the new disk a name, all done.


What?!! they've made it work like Windows?

OK I was being a bit facetious with the linux skit there.

But still, when adding a new or alien drive to an operating system,
tools like like disk administrator/manager, fdisk or gparted are
necessary to manage partitioning. Of course the user may elect to use
the entire space as one big volume clump, and skip the gory details.

But on Windows, and for lazy user convenience, most USB hard drives come
pre-formatted (think back to the early day supply of pre-formatted DOS
floppy discs) with FATx or NTFS and these users never visit the
partitioning tools, as above.

So they are just not that familiar with 'installation tech level tools'
when it comes to installing bare drives. The OPs query is one that is
quite common IME, above the lower level ones of SATA mode, jumpers, 4k
block firmware etc...

Drive letters in Windows remain and royally screw up software installs
if partitions have to be moved. In linux there are device entries. kind
of like drive letters, that point to partitions (hda1,2,3...) that can
be mounted and symlinked with some flexibilty, making everything appear
as one volume (if ye want to).

Ye can now do the same in windows (and have been for some time in the
world before e.g. SUBST), but Microsoft have muddied the whole thing now
and it's an immature mess. I could look at something that looks as it is
a symbolic link, nonchalantly delete the link, and then subsequently
find it actually was a hard link and all the folders below are now gone,
not to be found in the recycle bin. :-(

I hence stick to drive letters....

--
Adrian C

[mick[_2_]]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:21:33 +0000, Adrian C wrote:

On 30/01/2011 17:24, Tabby wrote:

Use a decent OS and you dont have all this going on. Try ubuntu if P4,
Antix or Puppy if older, and DSL if it doesnt have 128M ram.


Yup. Quite simple in Linux,

Just open up a terminal window, open a su shell, do a fdisk -l, mount -t
/dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3, and symlink that to somewhere more friendly or do
tar -xjfv ~/gparted-0.7.1.tar.bz2, ./configure, make, make check, make
install, run gparted, select disk, select partition, and format... In
case you get stuck, have another net connected PC standing by to spend
the rest of your life googling arcane error messages that apply
specially to one distribution and release and not the next.

:-|


Extreme LOL!

Been there, done that...

--
Mick (Working in a M$-free zone!)
Web: http://www.nascom.info
Filtering everything posted from googlegroups to kill spam.

[fred]

In article , Java Jive
writes
If *you* had a real job, you would not have the time to waste making
pointless and puerile posts.

Have you ever heard the term don't feed the trolls?

Please, don't bother answering.
--
fred
FIVE TV's superbright logo - not the DOG's, it's ********

[mick[_2_]]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 16:01:29 +0000, the_constructor wrote:

I have been building a computer up from parts donated.

I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or
thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections.
The first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I
then used the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.

I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon
booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said
it was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device
Manager.

The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so
the question is, "Where has my drive gone".



Are you sure that both drives have their master/slave settings right?
Have a look at the bios screen to see how they are. Windows can have some
strange rules when it gets to issuing drive letters.

--
Mick (Working in a M$-free zone!)
Web: http://www.nascom.info
Filtering everything posted from googlegroups to kill spam.

[the_constructor[_2_]]

"mick" wrote in message
eb.com...
On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 16:01:29 +0000, the_constructor wrote:

I have been building a computer up from parts donated.

I have put in an 80Gb hard drive which is split into 2 x 40Gb (or
thereabouts). I used fdisk on another machine to create the 2 sections.
The first I created was 40Gb for drive C which I then made active. I
then used the rest of the drive as drive D logical drive.

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine. I formatted drive D within Windows and all was well.

I installed yet another 20Gb drive just for my personal files area. upon
booting up, Windows XP recognised that the new drive was there and said
it was installed and ready for use. I could even see it in Device
Manager.

The problem is, the 20Gb drive does not show up in Windows Explorer, so
the question is, "Where has my drive gone".



Are you sure that both drives have their master/slave settings right?
Have a look at the bios screen to see how they are. Windows can have some
strange rules when it gets to issuing drive letters.

--
Mick (Working in a M$-free zone!)
Web: http://www.nascom.info
Filtering everything posted from googlegroups to kill spam.

I have been having a look at the drives.
I did have them both setup correctly, ie Master & Slave.
I did notice however that one drive is ATA100 and one is ATA133.
Would this make a difference ?

Jim

[John Williamson]

the_constructor wrote:
I have been having a look at the drives.
I did have them both setup correctly, ie Master & Slave.
I did notice however that one drive is ATA100 and one is ATA133.
Would this make a difference ?

It shouldn't. They'll just both work at the lower speed if they're on
the same controller channel.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

[Andy Champ[_2_]]

On 30/01/2011 21:13, the_constructor wrote:
wrote in message

Are you sure that both drives have their master/slave settings right?
Have a look at the bios screen to see how they are. Windows can have some
strange rules when it gets to issuing drive letters.

--
Mick (Working in a M$-free zone!)
Web: http://www.nascom.info
Filtering everything posted from googlegroups to kill spam.

I have been having a look at the drives.
I did have them both setup correctly, ie Master& Slave.
I did notice however that one drive is ATA100 and one is ATA133.
Would this make a difference ?

Jim



I'm with Mick. Look in the BIOS settings first. It's quite possible
that one of the drives is turned off in the BIOS. Try looking in the
BIOS when only one drive is connected.

I've never tried mixing different speed drives. Couldn't you put them
on different connectors?

BTW I suspect you could get bigger drives by asking nicely on
freecycle/freegle.

Andy

[the_constructor[_2_]]

"Andy Champ" wrote in message
. uk...
On 30/01/2011 21:13, the_constructor wrote:
wrote in message

Are you sure that both drives have their master/slave settings right?
Have a look at the bios screen to see how they are. Windows can have
some
strange rules when it gets to issuing drive letters.

--
Mick (Working in a M$-free zone!)
Web: http://www.nascom.info
Filtering everything posted from googlegroups to kill spam.

I have been having a look at the drives.
I did have them both setup correctly, ie Master& Slave.
I did notice however that one drive is ATA100 and one is ATA133.
Would this make a difference ?

Jim



I'm with Mick. Look in the BIOS settings first. It's quite possible that
one of the drives is turned off in the BIOS. Try looking in the BIOS when
only one drive is connected.

I've never tried mixing different speed drives. Couldn't you put them on
different connectors?

BTW I suspect you could get bigger drives by asking nicely on
freecycle/freegle.

Andy

I am the Group Owner of an Independant Local Group and that is where the
parts for the construction came from.

In Bios, both drives are seen. In Device Manager both drives are seen. In
Disc Cleanup only the partioned C & D drive are seen.

There has to be an answer somewhere.

Jim

[Adrian C]

On 30/01/2011 22:12, the_constructor wrote:


I am the Group Owner of an Independant Local Group and that is where the
parts for the construction came from.

In Bios, both drives are seen. In Device Manager both drives are seen. In
Disc Cleanup only the partioned C& D drive are seen.

There has to be an answer somewhere.


Have you looked in Disc Manager as asked at the start of this thread?

Start - Run - Type 'diskmgmt.msc' ( without the quotes )into the box and
hit enter.

--
Adrian C

[Mark]

the_constructor wrote:


In Bios, both drives are seen. In Device Manager both drives are seen. In
Disc Cleanup only the partioned C & D drive are seen.

There has to be an answer somewhere.

Jim

Right click on 'My Computer' select 'Manage' in the ensuing window,
click on 'Disk management' which is a sub heading of 'Storage'
you can set up your slave drive from there

-

[the_constructor[_2_]]

"Adrian C" wrote in message
...
On 30/01/2011 22:12, the_constructor wrote:


I am the Group Owner of an Independant Local Group and that is where the
parts for the construction came from.

In Bios, both drives are seen. In Device Manager both drives are seen. In
Disc Cleanup only the partioned C& D drive are seen.

There has to be an answer somewhere.


Have you looked in Disc Manager as asked at the start of this thread?

Start - Run - Type 'diskmgmt.msc' ( without the quotes )into the box and
hit enter.

--
Adrian C


My thanks to everyone for their advice. I now have the new drive working. I
never knew about "diskmgmt.msc". This command worked a treat.
I have been building computers now for about 5 years from parts donated and
have never come accross this problem before. I wonder if it is something to
do with the computer itself. It is a TIME computer with a KM400 motherboard.
Thanks again for the invaluable help.
JIm

[Tabby]

On Jan 30, 6:21*pm, Adrian C wrote:
On 30/01/2011 17:24, Tabby wrote:

Use a decent OS and you dont have all this going on. Try ubuntu if P4,
Antix or Puppy if older, and DSL if it doesnt have 128M ram.

Yup. Quite simple in Linux,

Just open up a terminal window, open a su shell, do a fdisk -l, mount -t
/dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3, and symlink that to somewhere more friendly or do
tar -xjfv ~/gparted-0.7.1.tar.bz2, ./configure, make, make check, make
install, run gparted, select disk, select partition, and format... In
case you get stuck, have another net connected PC standing by to spend
the rest of your life googling arcane error messages that apply
specially to one distribution and release and not the next.

:-|


Why would you do any of that? Just put the live cd in, and it'll deal
with partitioning & formatting during the install, automatically if
wished. Linux has come a long way since the early days, just as
windows has.

And for adding HDDs after installation, you can plug and unplug them
pretty freely, as with windows.


NT

[Rick Hughes[_3_]]

"Adrian C" wrote in message
...
On 30/01/2011 16:01, the_constructor wrote:

Probably needs either a format or a drive letter assigning. Have a look in
disk administrator.

--
Adrian C


I had some issue adding in extra HDD to my VISTA PC ... I downloaded free
copy of Paragan Partition Manager - worked a treat

[Mike Lane[_2_]]

Tim Streater wrote on Jan 30, 2011:

On the Macintosh you plug in the drive (USB, Firewire, etc, ...)
double-click on Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose what type of
file system you want installed and what partitions you want. Defaults to
HFS+ Journaled one partition, so nothing to do usually other than give
the disk a name and click Format. This is true whether the drive was
previously formatted or not.

And guess what - no drive letters.

If it's a stick and I'm likely to be sending it to a Windows user I'll
format it as FAT or ExFat (whatever that may be) as Windows users appear
to be poorly served in terms of knowing about other file systems.

The trouble with the Mac OS is that whatever the format, it leaves a whole
lot of hidden files on any drive that it opens. This normally doesn't matter
but I had a Garmin gps unit that totally freaked after I tried to read its
flash card with my Mac.

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
mike_lane at mac dot com

[The Natural Philosopher[_2_]]

Mike Lane wrote:
Tim Streater wrote on Jan 30, 2011:

On the Macintosh you plug in the drive (USB, Firewire, etc, ...)
double-click on Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose what type of
file system you want installed and what partitions you want. Defaults to
HFS+ Journaled one partition, so nothing to do usually other than give
the disk a name and click Format. This is true whether the drive was
previously formatted or not.

And guess what - no drive letters.

If it's a stick and I'm likely to be sending it to a Windows user I'll
format it as FAT or ExFat (whatever that may be) as Windows users appear
to be poorly served in terms of knowing about other file systems.

The trouble with the Mac OS is that whatever the format, it leaves a whole
lot of hidden files on any drive that it opens. This normally doesn't matter
but I had a Garmin gps unit that totally freaked after I tried to read its
flash card with my Mac.

fortunately, one can erase them.

Left my Nikon camera cluttered up with them all.

[Mike Lane[_2_]]

The Natural Philosopher wrote on Jan 31, 2011:

Mike Lane wrote:
Tim Streater wrote on Jan 30, 2011:

On the Macintosh you plug in the drive (USB, Firewire, etc, ...)
double-click on Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose what type of
file system you want installed and what partitions you want. Defaults to
HFS+ Journaled one partition, so nothing to do usually other than give
the disk a name and click Format. This is true whether the drive was
previously formatted or not.

And guess what - no drive letters.

If it's a stick and I'm likely to be sending it to a Windows user I'll
format it as FAT or ExFat (whatever that may be) as Windows users appear
to be poorly served in terms of knowing about other file systems.

The trouble with the Mac OS is that whatever the format, it leaves a whole
lot of hidden files on any drive that it opens. This normally doesn't
matter
but I had a Garmin gps unit that totally freaked after I tried to read its
flash card with my Mac.

fortunately, one can erase them.

Left my Nikon camera cluttered up with them all.


Yes. Formatting with anything other than a Mac will do it of course, or you
can use BlueHarvest to wipe them automatically

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
mike_lane at mac dot com

[Mike Lane[_2_]]

Tim Streater wrote on Jan 31, 2011:

In article . com,
Mike Lane wrote:

Tim Streater wrote on Jan 30, 2011:

On the Macintosh you plug in the drive (USB, Firewire, etc, ...)
double-click on Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose what type of
file system you want installed and what partitions you want. Defaults to
HFS+ Journaled one partition, so nothing to do usually other than give
the disk a name and click Format. This is true whether the drive was
previously formatted or not.

And guess what - no drive letters.

If it's a stick and I'm likely to be sending it to a Windows user I'll
format it as FAT or ExFat (whatever that may be) as Windows users appear
to be poorly served in terms of knowing about other file systems.

The trouble with the Mac OS is that whatever the format, it leaves a whole
lot of hidden files on any drive that it opens. This normally doesn't
matter
but I had a Garmin gps unit that totally freaked after I tried to read its
flash card with my Mac.

What version are you running?

I think it no longer does that with drives not formatted in HFS+. The
memory card my wife's Pentax uses can be snapped in two to turn it into
a USB stick (this process is reversible, BTW :-) and I just did that and
checked in Terminal: no extra files added. She always plugs the card
into her Mac and downloads the images that way to save battery. She's
using 10.5.8 and I'm running latest SL.

So it's no longer a problem.

I'm afraid it still is. Have you tried mounting a flash card on your Mac and
then moving the card to a Windows machine?

I'm running 10.6.6 and I just tried mounting an empty MS-DOS formatted
memory stick. There were three hidden folders placed on it:
..fseventsd
..Spotlight-V100
..Trashes

[.Trashes] is where deleted files are kept temporarily for example. I don't
think OS X could function normally without it . I assume the other two
folders are also fairly essential.

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
mike_lane at mac dot com

[Mike Lane[_2_]]

Tim Streater wrote on Jan 31, 2011:

In article . com,
Mike Lane wrote:

Tim Streater wrote on Jan 31, 2011:

What version are you running?

I think it no longer does that with drives not formatted in HFS+. The
memory card my wife's Pentax uses can be snapped in two to turn it into
a USB stick (this process is reversible, BTW :-) and I just did that and
checked in Terminal: no extra files added. She always plugs the card
into her Mac and downloads the images that way to save battery. She's
using 10.5.8 and I'm running latest SL.

So it's no longer a problem.

I'm afraid it still is. Have you tried mounting a flash card on your Mac
and
then moving the card to a Windows machine?

I'm running 10.6.6 and I just tried mounting an empty MS-DOS formatted
memory stick. There were three hidden folders placed on it:
.fseventsd
.Spotlight-V100
.Trashes

[.Trashes] is where deleted files are kept temporarily for example. I don't
think OS X could function normally without it . I assume the other two
folders are also fairly essential.

Hmmm, furtle furtle ... yes, you're right, these are created at the root
of the drive when it's mounted. It was the .DS_store files that appear
no longer to be created in each directory. I know that used to be a
problem. SWMBO's Pentax doesn't appear to care, either way.


Most things don't, but my Garmin GPSmap76 definitely does (it's a bug, I
think). As I said though it isn't really a problem. BlueHarvest completely
(and transparently) fixes it.

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
mike_lane at mac dot com

[Colonel Edmund J. Burke[_12_]]

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
...
the_constructor wrote:

Having put it into the computer and installed Windows XP everything was
working fine.

That's a logical impossibility.


Windows XP is so yesterday. LOL

[Mike Humphrey]

the_constructor wrote:


My thanks to everyone for their advice. I now have the new drive working. I
never knew about "diskmgmt.msc". This command worked a treat.
I have been building computers now for about 5 years from parts donated and
have never come accross this problem before. I wonder if it is something to
do with the computer itself. It is a TIME computer with a KM400 motherboard.
Thanks again for the invaluable help.
JIm

It's not new - in the DOS days you would have used FDISK and FORMAT. In
general, to install a hard drive under Windows (or any OS, really), you
need to do three things:
Physically install and connect the drive, including setting up the BIOS
if needed.
Partition the drive.
Format the new partition.

If you have a drive that's already been partitioned and formatted, then
you may be able to skip the last two steps - but if it's completely
blank, or the file system is inappropriate for the system you're adding
it to, then you'll need to do them.

Mike

[The Natural Philosopher[_2_]]

Mike Lane wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote on Jan 31, 2011:

Mike Lane wrote:
Tim Streater wrote on Jan 30, 2011:

On the Macintosh you plug in the drive (USB, Firewire, etc, ...)
double-click on Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose what type of
file system you want installed and what partitions you want. Defaults to
HFS+ Journaled one partition, so nothing to do usually other than give
the disk a name and click Format. This is true whether the drive was
previously formatted or not.

And guess what - no drive letters.

If it's a stick and I'm likely to be sending it to a Windows user I'll
format it as FAT or ExFat (whatever that may be) as Windows users appear
to be poorly served in terms of knowing about other file systems.
The trouble with the Mac OS is that whatever the format, it leaves a whole
lot of hidden files on any drive that it opens. This normally doesn't
matter
but I had a Garmin gps unit that totally freaked after I tried to read its
flash card with my Mac.

fortunately, one can erase them.

Left my Nikon camera cluttered up with them all.


Yes. Formatting with anything other than a Mac will do it of course, or you
can use BlueHarvest to wipe them automatically

didn't do either. Just plugged it into linux and asked it to erase
everything beginning with a dot ;-)

Macs are vile when connected to anything but another Mac.

[Mike Lane[_2_]]

The Natural Philosopher wrote on Feb 1, 2011:

Mike Lane wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote on Jan 31, 2011:

Mike Lane wrote:
Tim Streater wrote on Jan 30, 2011:

On the Macintosh you plug in the drive (USB, Firewire, etc, ...)
double-click on Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose what type of
file system you want installed and what partitions you want. Defaults to
HFS+ Journaled one partition, so nothing to do usually other than give
the disk a name and click Format. This is true whether the drive was
previously formatted or not.

And guess what - no drive letters.

If it's a stick and I'm likely to be sending it to a Windows user I'll
format it as FAT or ExFat (whatever that may be) as Windows users appear
to be poorly served in terms of knowing about other file systems.
The trouble with the Mac OS is that whatever the format, it leaves a
whole
lot of hidden files on any drive that it opens. This normally doesn't
matter
but I had a Garmin gps unit that totally freaked after I tried to read
its
flash card with my Mac.

fortunately, one can erase them.

Left my Nikon camera cluttered up with them all.


Yes. Formatting with anything other than a Mac will do it of course, or you
can use BlueHarvest to wipe them automatically

didn't do either. Just plugged it into linux and asked it to erase
everything beginning with a dot ;-)

Macs are vile when connected to anything but another Mac.

I wouldn't say that exactly :-)

I agree that Mac OS should clean up stuff it leaves when it finishes with a
foreign formatted drive, but OTOH any software that tries to read unknown
files and then reacts badly to them is just plain faulty (IMO of course).


--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
mike_lane at mac dot com