Apple laptop (seems to have) killed my external HD

[sunbeam alpine]

Yesterday I plugged my external HD into a colleague's Apple laptop in order for her to copy some files for a project. Nothing happened (the Apple didn't detect the HD), and then the Macbook seemed to "freeze". I unplugged the external HD and the Macbook started working fine again.

Now, when I plug the external HD into my (Windows) laptop, it is detected and appears in explorer, but won't open - windows says the drive needs to be formatted. If I try to format it it fails. I can see the exteral HD in system administration-computer administration-disk administration, but it's showing as an unknown partition. I'm unable to delete/format the partition.

I've used the external HD in both Windows & Linux systems without any problem, plugging it into the Macbook seems to have kiled it.

It's not very old so I doubt it's a hardware failure. It's still under guarantee but I'm not going to hand it over as it contains a lot of sensitive information. I don't need to retrieve the the information as I have the originals on my laptop (plus a backup).

Any suggestions for reviving it?

Edited by sunbeam alpine on Wednesday 11th December 10:34

[sunbeam alpine]

Baldchap said:

If you can't get that far, press Win+R and type diskmgmt.msc with the drive plugged in.

Then format as above from in there.

Thanks for both of your replies. The external HD was whatever format it comes with out of the box.

The diskmgmt.msc shows the drive, the whole drive as a partition of unknown format, and I am unable to carry out any operations on the drive - delete/format the existing partition.

ETA - the apple solution you linked to may be worth a try. I'm surprised that Apple is unable to read Windows partitions automatically.