format external hard drive for mac and windows?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Janice F. Jorgensen
  • Start date Start date
J

Janice F. Jorgensen

I have a new external hard drive. I want to be able to use it with my ibook
with os x 10.2.8 and my win2k and winxp machine.
How do I format part for a backup of my ibook with carbon copy and the other
part to backup on my win2k machine?

I think i format it first on the win2k machine in FAT32 but then????

Thanks

Janice F. Jorgensen
 
Janice F. Jorgensen said:
I have a new external hard drive. I want to be able to use it with my ibook
with os x 10.2.8 and my win2k and winxp machine.
How do I format part for a backup of my ibook with carbon copy and the other
part to backup on my win2k machine?

I think i format it first on the win2k machine in FAT32 but then????
Click to expand...

Hi Janice!

If you haven't begun storing files on your drive, feel free to play
around a little and test different formats. I'd suggest trying FAT32
first because it can handle volume sizes larger than 4GB and more
files/folders within a single folder.

I'm not sure about Mac OS X 10.2.8 but Mac OS X 10.3 can understand FAT
and FAT32 drive formats. The Mac's Disk Utility application found in
/Applications/Utilities can even format the drive in FAT and FAT32. It
shouldn't matter which machine formats the drive.

For more reading have a look at this link on Apple's website
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75320>.

Hope this helps! bill
 
Janice F. Jorgensen said:
I have a new external hard drive. I want to be able to use it with my ibook
with os x 10.2.8 and my win2k and winxp machine.
How do I format part for a backup of my ibook with carbon copy and the other
part to backup on my win2k machine?
Click to expand...

Probably the best is to partion the drive into two parts. Disk utility on OS
X will let you set up the partitions.

Format the Mac partition using HFS+, the PC Partition using FAT32. This way
a CCC backup of your mac is usable, if it's a Firewire drive, iot's bootable.

If you want, then you can connect the drive to a windows system and reformat
it as NTFS if you want; but thereafter the mac will see it as unreadable and
ask if you want to reformat it.

OS X 10.4 includes support for NTFS filesystems.

If you need to access the HFS partition from Windows MacDrive from Media
Four s a very useful utility; it enables Windows systems to seamlessly read
all Mac disk formats.
 
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