I brought a segway (sp) externall HDD a few months back, its USB, it works fine on my XP computer but when i connect it to my ME computer it see's it but says its not formatted.

I've got load of stuff on there already and dont want to format it for the ME computer.

How do i get around this?

it's probably formatted with NTFS, which ME cant access - you can read the drive for free with software, but you might have to pay to be able to write?

Did you install the usb drivers the the HDD ?

But as Andy mentioned. It's probably formatted as NTFS is your getting to the point it's telling you its not formatted.

It will be NTFS, but then any excuse to get rid of an ME machine is a good excuse

:iagree:

Most modern Linux distributions will read NTFS and make a far superiour replacement for ME...

Upgrading the ME machine to XP should solve that issue.

You could even go Win 2k

ME is like a polished turd no matter how it' dresed its stil ****, 98SE was much better

well i only brought it to get all my porn...i mean files....off the me machine as its about deed.

so anyway i can get the files off it onto the HDD without upgrading it or is it a deffinate no no

You could always re-format the drive as FAT32 and then your ME machine will read it just fine

network the two computers, share the external HDD on the XP computer and copy the files across from the ME computer?

hmm network, yeah that muight work, they are networked anyway apart from the fact i have to hold the network cable a certain way for connection (dropped it many a time on the dongle lol)

Trouble with that is it'll take ages, might be my best option tough. cheers for the helpf and info people

If the PC's are networked with 100MBit network cards I don't see the point in using the external hard disc to tranfer them. Just make sure both PC@s have 100MBit or 1GBit Network cards and buy a new CAT5 cable, cheap as anyway.

Other option is copy everything off the HDD, reformat it with a 2GB or whatever the max size is FAT32 partition and then format the rest NTFS. Anything you want to share you put on the FAT drive.

Other option is copy everything off the HDD, reformat it with a 2GB or whatever the max size is FAT32 partition and then format the rest NTFS. Anything you want to share you put on the FAT drive.

FAT32 partitions can be formatted up to at least 500Gb, but your still limited to a max file size of 2Gb.

XP just doesn't support creating such large FAT32 partitions but there are plenty of tools out there that will do it.

FAT32 partitions can be formatted up to at least 500Gb, but your still limited to a max file size of 2Gb.

XP just doesn't support creating such large FAT32 partitions but there are plenty of tools out there that will do it.

Yeah I know, I forgot what XP's limit was and to be fair it is there for a good reason as things get very wasteful past that size.

assuming this are desktop machines... remove the hard drive from the ME machine, and insert it into the xp machine as a slave drive, then copy what you need and if its big enough to be worth keeping, then keep it as a second drive.

Yeah I know, I forgot what XP's limit was and to be fair it is there for a good reason as things get very wasteful past that size.

Yeah but drives are cheap enough now...