external hard drive locked???

[PegLeg Media]

I use a toshiba 2tb external harddrive to edit all my work. I plugged it into my PC for 2 minutes to try to drag a file to my pc, it asked if I wanted to reformat the hard drive for my pc, i said no and unplugged it without making any changes. Now trying to use the hard drive with my mac again, i cannot transfer anything to the harddrive b/c it says it is locked. I cannot edit any of my old projects from the hard drive but I can copy and paste projects to my desktop and work on them from there. Is my only hope to buy a new hard drive and transfer everything to that hard drive, then reformat this one?

The only hard drive I have ever had success with was a toshiba 250gb that I never did anything to format it, but it has worked for 8 years and can go back and forth from PC to mac with no issues.

I know someone will say plugging and unplugging my hard drive into my PC would not make a difference since I made no changes, didnt transfer anything to or from the hard drive and did not reformat but that still screwed everything up. I proved a lot of people wrong on this forum who said the same thing about my memory cards. if I plug my memory cards into my PC they no longer let me transcode my GH2 mts files on my mac. I have to reformat the card and it works with my mac again as long as I dont ever plug it into my PC for even a second.

so back to the point. Can i unlock my hard drive? When I format a hard drive how to I make it PC and Mac friendly so I can transfer files onto my PC while using it to work mainly with my mac?

 

[Steve_Karl]

On a PC ... always use the "safely remove hardware" option when turning off or disconnecting an external drive.

If I had it here, I'd boot a PC from an Ubuntu Live USB stick, get all of the data off of the drive and then delete the partition, re create the partition and reformat the new partition.

If you don't have a redundant second copy of everything on that drive then your flirting with disaster.