Can i do this with a Mac Machine?

[glynblue2]

I have an old external hard drive (Western Digital passport) which when plugged into my Mac it is not recognised, I'm guessing this is because it has been configured for a windows based PC however I would like to access it using my Mac. Any ideas?

[Lazarus]

dont listen to me - apparently Im talking bollox!

[Fazerider]

If it's not corrupted or an otherwise duff drive you should be able to read and write if it's FAT32 formatted. If it's NTFS i think there is a utility that'll let you read, but not write to it.

[glynblue2]

Cheers will see what i can do to format then 

[Fazerider]

OK. I was thinking there was data on it that you might want.
On my Mac I usually format USB drives FAT32 rather than HFS, it's often a handy way to transfer large files to and from Windows boxes.

[glynblue2]

 

[Dead Eye]

FAT32 is also recognised widely by Linux systems so its a very handy format to use. The drawback is that the file size limit is 4GB (minus 1 byte) - for every day use this is fine though

[simonm]

Fat, fat32 and ntfs are all recognised on osx. I'd do a chkdsk in windows.

Ntfs may not work or may only be read able in osx prior to leopard.