external HD formatting

S

steinguitar

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I've got a 120 gig external that's formatted in NTFS from my windows days. Now, I can't write to the HD, so I dumped all my data onto a friend's computer (a PC) so I could reformat it. What file system should I use? I'm looking at Disk Utility and there's Mac, Mac Extended, Unix and Free Space. Will any of these be compatible with both windows and mac? Basically, I'm looking for a way to write and read to this HD from a mac and from a PC. Is this possible?
 
If you want to be able to read and write to the drive from both systems (Mac & PC) then you'll need to format the drive on the PC as FAT32. The side-effect of this is that you'll have slower read/write times on the Macintosh. The Macintosh won't let you format a drive as FAT32, so that's why you gotta do it on the PC.

The NTFS format is read-only on the Macintosh, so that's why you couldn't write to the drive on the Mac.
 
Here's some info that lets you format a drive as FAT32 from the Mac!

from the web said:
MS-DOS fat32 format with Disk Utility
Go into Disk Utility, right-click on the drive you want to format, and select Info. See what the disk identifier is (for example, "disk3"). Click on the Partition tab, and remove remove all the partitions for that drive (careful here, you can't hose your boot partition, but any others are open season).

fdisk -i -a dos /dev/rdisk# (where # is the disk number you got above)

That creates a new partition, full size (up to 127GB), with auto sector sizes and such. Now you need to format it:
newfs_msdos -F 32 /dev/rdisk#s1
You can optionally specify a volume name with:
newfs_msdos -F 32 -v volname /dev/rdisk#s1
- - volname is whatever name you want in DOS 8.3 rules.

Note that the capital "F" is critical. Lower-case "f" means something else.
You can always use fdisk /dev/rdisk# without anything else to see what the current info is for that disk.
Click to expand...
 
i've got an external HD (160GB) and it is formated fat32 and it works just fine. i would not say that it is slower with the mac then the PC.
 
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