Windows Doesn't Recognize External Hard Drive

The laptop in question is running Windows XP. The hard drive is either a generic brand or a name brand who doesn't believe in putting their name on the drive itself. There's definitely nothing wrong with the hard drive, since I use it all the time with my desktop running OSX Lion and it works perfectly. The USB port I'm trying to plug it into also works fine when tested with a mouse.

Since none of my flash drives work with Windows either, I'm assuming there's some trick to making Windows recognize external memory. I even tried reformatting one of the flash drives into FAT (or whatever they call the non-Apple format) with Apple's disk manager and it still wasn't recognized. My 500gb external drive is also in a universal format. I just left it in the format it came in from the manufacturer. Reformatting that one isn't an option anyway, since I have nowhere else to store the 400gb of data on it.

So how do I make XP recognize the external drives?

kuwisdelu said:

Did you use FAT32 or exFAT filesystems? Both are cross-compatible between OS X and Windows, but the latter only works with Vista and 7, I think.

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Well, the flash drive I tested a while ago was formatted FAT32. I'll have to plug the external back into the iMac and see if Disk Utility will tell me what format it's in.

lordzapharos said:

Go to the device manager in Windows and see if the hard drive shows up there as an Unknown Device -- you may be missing the drivers necessary to use it.

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OK, where is this device manager thing? I looked under the Control Panel and it's not there...

When you first used the flash drive/external, was it on a Mac? Mac has been known to have issues with the proper formatting of flash/hard drives, so you may need to reformat the device on a Windows to ensure cross-platform compatibility. Considering that OSX Lion has a myriad of other issues, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the problem.

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The flash drives were formatted originally by my Mac, but the external hard drive was already formatted when I took it out of the box. I plugged it into the iMac and it immediately worked, so I never bothered reformatting it.

OK, nevermind. Like kuwi suggested, the hard drive was in the wrong format for XP. I still don't know why the flash drives don't work even in FAT32, but I wouldn't be surprised if it comes down to some disliking between XP and Lion.

Sorry for bothering you. I didn't realize there was more than one Windows format.

No, I haven't tested the FAT32 flash drive on any of my other systems. The rest are all Apple and I figured if it worked on my Lion system it would probably work on the other Apples too.

I gave up on flash drives entirely and figured out how to turn sharing on in XP. I have no trouble at all getting files transferred from one system to another as long I avoid physical media, it seems.