Why Does My Usb Drive Show 0 Bytes?

500 gb Lacie usb external hard drive won't show up in mac but it shows up in pc, please help?

• although I still have trouble getting it to work on my pc (the first times I plug it in I get a "usb not recognised" message but then after a couple of tries i manage to get it to work. is there a way to back up all files onto something like a virtual hard drive? I would like to avoid having to buy another external hard drive. if I could just copy all 500gb of files onto a virtual hard drive I then would be able to format it and transfer all the files back to it. any ideas how to solve this without spending more money? thx

• Answer:

  Make sure the drive is formatted in something that both computers understand. -- >>Likely FAT32 Your Windows machine probably has formatted it as NTFS.. If you let the Mac do it, you'd have the reverse problem with HFS or something similar. 1) any files on the new drive - copy them someplace else safe. 2) decide if you want the entire drive to be FAT32 (if yes, you might want to make 2 - 250GB partitions, but not absolutely required)... or if you can leave part of drive NTFS and make a new FAT32 partition. 3) Use software on either machine, Disk manager in Windows.. or fdisk / format from the cmd line, or Disk Utility on the Mac, or a free download from LaCie ( yahoo answers tagged last below is wrong.. Fat32 can work up to 2TB ) 4) after you have made a new partition (or two) and formatted that.. copy one or two small files. Test that both computers can read & write to the drive before you start any serious backup.