I have a Western digital 500GB external hardrive and I made it my time capsule. I now want to copy all that stuff onto my windows computer but it don't even come up when I plug it in. I don't want to reset if you can because I got lots of things on there I want to keep. Any one help me?Have you tried a different usb port? And forgive a silly question, but it is plugged in to the AC outlet, yes?It doesn't come up because the drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which is an HFS partition, and not Fat32, Fat, or NTFS (which windows can read).

You need to pull that data off of the hard drive from a mac. Quote from: socrates on October 15, 2009, 08:57:30 AM

It doesn't come up because the drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which is an HFS partition, and not Fat32, Fat, or NTFS (which windows can read).

You need to pull that data off of the hard drive from a mac.

You know, I had never heard the term "time capsule" applied to a hard drive before & just assumed it was something the user made up. I NEVER would have known that it was an Apple thing - good catch

Ah, ok I will try that. Thanks for your help guys! 

Yeah, unless you've used one (or were a big apple guy/gal) it probably wouldn't have come to mind.

It's a very nice, very easy to use backup system.  However, if you back it up as a mac formatted drive, windows doesn't like it.

I'm not a mac person so I don't know this, can Macs see Windows disk formatting? Like fat, fat32, exFAT, or NTFS?

So have the external hard drive in windows FAT32 format and then it works in mac and windows. Right?

Yes.  Or if you want to format it via Disk Utility on your mac, you can format as FAT and it'll work between windows and mac as well (and linux).