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mac format for PC will not read

K

kevin cable

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Anyone help with this issue?
The DIT on our shoot as most use a mac for transferring footage from the red drive to a portable hard drive. They make the master on a mac for FCP and then make a second copy for me for adobe premier. I do a off-line on the adobe and take it on line with the FCP. The DIT formatted the drive (lacie 1T) for PC and dumped all the footage on the drive. I am back from the shoot and the drive does not read? There is no letter for the drive? although you can hear the sound effect, from the computer, that it has plugged into the system. I have done many other shoots where the DIT hands me a copy for PC and have no problems ! Anyone have any ideas why I cannot see the drive or the footage? The copy made for FCP from the shoot is fine and all the footage is there...
thanks in advance!
 
Need Software

Need Software

A Mac OS computer will typically recognize most types of Mac or Windows OS drive formatting. A Windows PC will not recognize a drive formatted HFS for use with a Mac. To view the drive contents, you will need a third party software such as this:

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
 
How is the drive formatted ? NTFS ?
In case the drive has by mistake been formatted for Mac, you might want to look at MacDrive, which will allow you to open Mac-formated drives on Windows.
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

I don't remember what it's called in Windows, but I think there is something similar to the disk utility in OSX. If you find that (sorry, I have no idea how it's called in english), try to see if your drive at least appears in there, then you may be able to change the drive letter...

EDIT : Ok, Greg was faster than me :-)
 
For future reference I highly recommend using either a fat32 formatted drive (2GB file limit) or a ntfs plugin such as NTFS-3G that will allow you to format and write to windows formatted drives from your mac.
 
I tried the mac drive 8 and did not recognize anything?
I am going to try a mac laptop and see if it reads it
thanks for the help
 
could be lots of things wrong here. Most likely, the drive is formatted for OSX, as has already been pointed out. Although, if Macdrive isn't reading it, there could be other problems. If it was in fact formatted for FAT-32, then there could be a problem with the partition map and that could potentially be fixed via diskpart. You can use diskpart to view the partition table of the drive and see just what you have, most likely a MacOS formatted drive.

In this case, you could use third-party software to read the MacOS partition on your PC. Or you could have them give you another drive that you can read.

It could always be a problem with the external drive or enclosure...
 
thanks for the help everyone
the drive was formatted on a mac booted in pc mode, but the HD was not formatted to be seen on a windows 7 platform. I guess ? the problem is with fat32 believe, We connected the drive to a mac laptop and all the footage is there. now to get it to a pc format that the adobe computer can read. the newer formatted drives did not work it was an older 500 gig drive that the mac could transfer to and the windows 7 could read. again I just listening to people talk and this is somewhat of what i heard?
the main thing is thanks to all of you on here its great to know people will help, even if its mac or pc, we all have the same goal "do a good job, be creative, and be helpful!"
THANKS
 
N_Villers said:
And by-the-way the term DIT gets bandied around quite a lot incorrectly. Not to say whomever you worked with is not a qualified DIT but those who really just handle media and workflow are better termed as a DAM (digital asset manager) or digital loader aka 3rd camera assistant. A true DIT works in a much broader capacity designing and working with LUTs, on-set compositing, editing and much more. Just a little pet peeve of mine.:rant:
Click to expand...

There is no such thing as a DAM [or DAS or data wrangler or RED geek or...] as far as these duties are concerned, only DITs, loaders ["digital loaders" if one prefers] and all of the other usual camera positions we know and love. All of these made-up names end up hurting and weakening the camera community more than anything else.

Also, a DIT does not do any on-set compositing or editing - doing so [particularly the latter] would be infringing on other locals' work.

I know it's unrelated to this thread, but please be careful with the terms and advice you throw around with some of these topics. I'm not a union-happy guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I sure like to get my healthcare hours. Put "DAM" or any of these other fabricated camera position names down on your timecard and you'll never see those hours. :(

[pre-emptive strike: let's keep this about Kevin's issue... I just wanted to prevent that can of worms from staying open! :)]
 
the DIT told me he formatted the drive in FAT32 on the mac. when I connect it to my system windows 7, it makes a sound that its connected and then says installing driver. Although cannot read the drive. He says he does this all the time with no problems and I know others who do the same. I tried the mac8 program and it did not read it either.
any ideas? for future reference?
again if I hook the drive to a mac it will read it and I can copy to another drive from my computer and the footage is there.
thaks
 
Could well be the partition map. OSX supports three kinds of partition table, I think. Windows used to only recognise the MBR sort.

Windows 7 might know about GUID (the default OSX kind, if I remember right) but if it doesn't, then it wouldn't matter whether the partitions were FAT32, NTFS, HFS+ or anything else - the computer wouldn't know where they were.

Not sure if that's any use, but it might be helpful in the future, I guess. The way to see if Windows is able to see a partition table is to use the Disk Management snap-in thing - if there are 'unknown' volumes on a disk, then you're reading the partitions but not the file systems - if the disk shows no volumes at all, then you're not even seeing the partition table.

(all of the above is off the top of my head, so probably isn't 100% accurate, but the general point is valid regardless)
 
At least you can get to the footage. But this does indeed sound like a partition map issue, which was also mentioned above. If that is the case, it's simple to fix, but will usually result in having to re-format the drive, losing all the data. You can view the drive partition map info, and rebuild it if needed, by using the diskpart utility. It's a command-line utility in Windows. Go to the command prompt and type: diskpart

This DIT guy may "do this all the time", but it seems he may have goofed up when partitioning and formatting the drive. This is a common goof-up sometimes on the Mac, taking a MacOS formatted drive with a GUID partition map and not reconfiguring it to MS-DOS MBR before formatting as FAT-32. MacOS will still use it just fine, but Windows systems won't recognize the partition or the data. Disk Utility on the Mac should not allow for this to happen, and it's supposed to not allow it, but sometimes it does happen. Glitches like this can also occasionally happen if a partition is deleted and a new one created without doing a wipe of the free space, so there could end up being a few erroneous bits at the beginning of the drive.

You can always load up the disk manager in Windows and take a look there. It will most likely just show the drive with an incompatible partition. You will still need to use diskpart or other capable utility to repair it. Or erase the partition map and zero out the drive (low level format). This is all pretty basic IT/computer technical stuff and any good DIT will know all this. ..Just sayin'
 
Partition Problem

Partition Problem

As others have suggested, it is probably a drive partition issue. A Fat32 partition should be limited to 32GB. If the partition is larger, it won't be recognized under Windows OS.
 
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