So I was cruising craigslist yesterday, idly searching for computer parts I could use. I ran across a guy selling a half-dozen hard drives (desktop and laptop), including a couple of 500 Gb and one Tb. Under 10 bucks apiece. So I contacted him and drove down to pick them up. Sorry eBay; no shipping, no waiting (and also no guarantee, but I knew where he lived ).

When I got back home, I used one of those gizmos that attach to a hard drive and allow you to connect it to a USB port. Well, Windows recognized the gizmo all right, but there seemed to be nothing attached to it - My Computer and Disk Management could see nothing.

I tried that with a couple of the other drives, with the same result. Uh oh. But wait - maybe the gizmo is bad - wouldn't surprise me. So I opened up the desktop and found a spare SATA connector and power feed and booted it up. Checking the bios showed that, indeed, there was a 500 Gb drive connected. Swell. Up comes Windows ... and no drive. It's like it's not even there. Hmmm. Instead of a cheap pile of hard drives, did I just buy an expensive pile of bricks? .

And then ..."@:-)" ... Wait a minute! I recall that when I was in his office getting the drives, I saw a Mac on his desk, and a Mac laptop. I'll bet these are Mac drives.

A quick google check shows that they are probably formatted HFS, and I believe Windows does not (natively) support HFS. There are some utilities out there to read HFS, but I wasn't interested in reading the files, just getting at the disks.

After a little more coffee and some cogitating, I had an idea. I've done a lot of installs recently, so I dug out a Windows install CD (it was XP SP3, but it doesn't matter). I booted up the CD (with the new drive still attached) and once Windows had done its preliminary file loading, it asked me whether I wanted to do a repair or a clean install. I selected a clean install. It then showed me possible places, including my current drive, and a 500 Gb blob of "unknown partition". I selected the blob and then selected "Delete". It warned me of all the bad things that can happen when you delete a partition (yeah, yeah, yeah ... those are the bad things I want to happen) and said go ahead.

It now shows me a list of places, including a 500 Gb blob of "unpartitioned space". I selected it again and said "Create a partition", which it did.

I now had a partition that Windows could see!

Remove the CD, re-boot into Windows, and there's my drive. Made it an NTFS partition and formatted it. I don't know much about HFS (nothing, actually) but I know a 'quick format' just resets the indices, etc. and doesn't touch the bulk of the disk. Since I wasn't sure what HFS might leave out there, I decided to do a full format. Took well over an hour, but I was in business.

Once I had the procedure, I did the rest of them (I let the TB drive format overnight ). Chkdsk showed them all to be 100% working order, no bad sectors, etc.

Now ... this all may be something everyone knows, but I didn't, and there may be others out there who don't know either.

Also, I can see situations where you might have a chance to pick up a nice Mac drive but when you try to use it, you'll be stumped like I was. Now you know what to do.