Format an external?

A

adiliegro

Registered
I have two external hard drives, one of which is NTFS (yeah, i know, but I was running XP then). the other is Fat32. The Fat32 I can read and write TO, but the NTFS, i cant, obviously. What I want to do is take all of the files (wedding imags from my weddings) and move them to the Fat32 drive and reformat the NTFS drive. Two questions come to mind -

1. When i move them to the Fat32 drive, I should be able to read and write those files to that drive, right? It' just like moving them to my hard drive, right?

2. How the heck do I format this other drive? im new to the Mac and have no clue how to format on here.

Any help appreciated!
 
You may want to do the copy on a PC and reformat the NTFS disk with fdisk on the PC.

The disk utility software in the Applications/Utilities will allow you to partition and format FAT file systems as well. Connect drive, select the drive in the side bar menu in Disk Utility. Select the partition tab and follow your instincts :)

Just make sure you have all the data safely moved before doing this!!!!
 
You can actually format any hard disk with Dsik Utility, regardless of the format it's currently in. Just open Disk Utility and select the device (not the volume, which is listed directly below and indented from the device) and select the "Partition" tab. Choose "1 partition" (or however many you want) and select the format (HFS+ or HFS+ Journaled; I recommend HFS+ for drives other than the boot drive). Then click the "Partition" button, and you've got a Macintosh external hard drive. If you want a format different from HFS+, then you'll have to format the drive with your PC or some other non-Macintosh computer.

And yes, you should be able to copy from the NTFS drive to the FAT32 drive without problem.
 
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