Who has experience with mac osx?

[JacobZ]

Ok, so i was going to put some music on my sister's mac for her, and i connected my external hard drive to the mac and walked away for a minute, but what happened when i was gone was, she somehow turned my external hard drive into a time machine backup, now windows won't recognize the god damn thing, and when i open it up on the mac, none of my music files are there....
Freaking pain in my *** garrrr
i hate osx.

[FrozenIce]

Well lets see here yup yup, your data is gone. I'm guessing your external hard drive was NTFS/FAT32 formatted. Time Machine requires HFS+ file system in order to backup correctly. If the HD that is plugged in does not match these requirements and Time Machine is asked to use the drive, it will reformat it to the HFS+ file system. Windows isn't made to access this type of drive format so if you want to bring it back to normal(your data is still gone) you can follow the steps in a few seconds. I do want to point out that while your data is gone, you can get programs like File Scavenger (highly recommend) to scan the drive and have a chance at restoring the lost data. The demo of File Scavenger allows you to do full scans but you can only restore up to 32kb files or something like that, so you will have to get the full version or find another program. Anyhow...

After you plug in the drive to your Windows machine, you can right click My Computer on the desktop and select manage. Expand the + next to Storage and then click Disk Management. You should see a few volumes listed and from there you should be able to format the drive. If you have questions on any of this just speak up and I'll try the best I can to help ya.

[JacobZ]

Well the data wasn't all that much its just that windows won't recognize the drive at alleven in disk defragmentor

[FrozenIce]

Not disk defragmenter, disk management. They are quite the two different programs, make sure you clicked the disk management because even if its not set correctly, it should show up in there.

[calliopi]

you formated it. It's not the OS's fault. I use a mac and almost did the same thing. i hooked up my windows formatted external, and the computer almost did a time machine, but gave me a warning that is was going to wipe out the external and format it so time machine could use it. I selected 'no'. Looks like you or someone there selected yes.

[JacobZ]

I didn't format it, my sister did, i wasn't there when she hit "Set this drive as a time machine backup". I obviously would have told her not to do it. I just want to know how to get it back, windows won't pick it up at all, when i go into disk management only my C: drive shows up. Attached link related. http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/n...g?t=1215360839

[FrozenIce]

Well that sucks, here this should work for you(as long as time machine doesn't interfere). You did say it still shows up on the Mac so we will use its utility to erase it back to FAT32.

I just found some nice pictured instructions(better than me typing it out by hand) at:

Formatting an External Device - Mac Guides

When it comes to selecting the type you want to format it as, make sure to select MS-DOS File System. After this is done you should be able to get it back up and running on your windows machine as this is a nice wonderful format that windows can use lol.

[JacobZ]

God this is aggravating, when i went to format the HD on the mac, there was no option for FAT32....

[FrozenIce]

What options are listed then?