Preparing Hard Drive for Mac from PC

M

MMak

Registered
I have a 60GB secondary drive in my PC that is never being used and I'd like to swap it out to fit inside a firewire/USB 2.0 enclosure to use as a backup drive for my Powerbook. Most likely I'm just going to use it for my Mac only and if I really want to transfer some stuff from the PC to this external drive, I can network it.

I've just finished formatting the 60GB drive to FAT32 in Windows XP Home. My question is, what else do I need to do in order to make this drive fully compatible with the Mac?

I'd like to remove every tiny piece of information in the drive and start completely fresh like it's a newly purchased drive, can I do it in the Mac or PC?

Thanks, any info appreciated!
 
Plug it to the Mac and it should work. However, using Disk Utility(Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility and re-format it to HFS+. The HFS+ is the normal OS X format and if the drive is the same then transfers will be faster.
 
I just ripped the disk out of my PC, shoved into the firewire enclosure, plugged it in, turned it on and everything worked (no erasing, re-formatting etc.). Compatibility is not an issue when working with Macs. It's the PC's that aren't compatible with anything else.
 
I recently got a new external and needed to format it via Disk Utility. Once I did that, everything went aces, so there can be compatibility issues. If you can mount the external, you're halfway there. Go into Disk Utility and verify the disk. If it says no problems, you should be ok. If not, you have the option then to re-format.
 
Even though FAT32 works just fine with OS X, you're still gonna be limited in the filenames that can reside on the drive. For example, Mac OS X's HFS+ allows the use of special characters such as '?', ";" and others in the filename, while FAT32 doesn't like them (this can cause corrupted files, or just a flat-out refusal to copy/read the files with offending names on the hard drive).

I would suggest reformatting the drive as HFS+, as Satcomer suggested. It takes only a few seconds and will help with compatibility in the long run.
 
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