joestriker said:
my mate has a windows xp comp, he says he can format it in ntsf since fat32 is old news now. Is this possible, will this work at all? or does it have to be fat32
Don't format as NTFS, you won't be able to save files to the drive.
Here's some info for creating a FAT32 partition, which will then allow full use on both a Mac or a PC. Sorry, I haven't cleaned it up. It's a little confusing, but uses both disk Utility to get some info, and then terminal to do the deed:
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).
Now to the terminal and type:
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.
