Harddrive not being read by Windows 7

Long story short, My computer was having some problems with my extrernal HDD (wasn't reading the backups on the drive), so I decided to wipe the external HDD clean. I go to school, and find out that my older brother used it to back up some things on his Macbook. He says that he wiped the stuff off of the HDD, and that it should work on my computer. Except, it doesn't. My computer recognizes that the HDD is connected (the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" icon shows up on my taskbar, and I get a warning sound when I plug the HDD out.) The HDD is also listed as a device. However, the HDD isn't listed as a drive (along with my C:, FACTORY IMAGE, and SYSTEM drives.) The harddrive is still being read by his Macbook, which leads me to believe that it now needs to be formatted for Windows 7. Thing is, I dunno how to format it, when it doesn't even appear as a drive. Any way I can fix this? MY HDD is a 500GB HP SimpleSave haddrive My computer is running Windows 7 64-Bit Home.

Apple file system is able to recognize FAT32 , and possibly recognize NTFS without being able to write to NTFS. Your Windows system "should" see any file partition created by Mac OS if the Apple system was using FAT32. But if your Windows files were saved on a HD formated in NTFS and then later used with an Apple system, you may no longer have access to your files. Windows does not natively recognize HFS (apple file system) There "might" be a work-around, to regain access to your Windows related files but I am not familiar with doing it. Plus, you don't actually say what actions your brother performed on the external HD. If you can, you might post some additional information about what your brother did…………in hopes that one of our Apple users might know a solution.

He merely used "Time Machine" to back up his Macbook. When he was done, he dragged and dropped the backup folder into the Trashbin. No, there isn't anything Windows related to be recovered from the harddrive, since I wiped it before my older brother gained access to it. My issue is that my computer no longer recognizes my harddrive as a drive, but rather, merely a device. Because of this, I can't store or format anything onto my drive.

Until Doug gets back to you….. here are some workarounds: 1 If you brother's MAC can "see" the external hard drive get him to format it as Fat32…then your machine will be able to see it (hopefully) and you will then be able to format it to NTFS if that is what you want…. note that the format is a "destructive process and will clear anything that is on the drive. 2 Boot into a live distro of LInux…….and check if Linux can see your external hard drive…..there is a good chance it will…. Puppy is good and easy to use (ideal for a predominantly Windows user) and so is Ubuntu you can then use Linux to format as FAT32 or NTFS using gparted…… However a word of warning…make sure that you are formatting the correct drive…… you don't want to format your main boot drive by mistake…… ……and linux uses different nomentclature in its naming conventions than the C; that is familiar to Windows users. Regards paws

This has been fixed I merely replaced the HDD (exchanged this one for another one) Being read fine by the computer now. Lock thread?

Hi, Glad you got it fixed. Well done! Regards paws