working with both Mac and PC with an external hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter rabinoa
  • Start date Start date
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rabinoa

Hi,
I have bought a D2 300GB Lacie external hard drive. My computer at home
is a PC so I have formatted the hard drive to NTFS to be compatible
with my PC. However, I have a mac in school and all my assignments are
saved there and I would like to be able to transfer them to my external
hard drive.
Does anyone know of a way I can format the hard drive to work both with
Mac and with PC?
Thanks,
Noa
 
Previously rabinoa said:
Hi,
I have bought a D2 300GB Lacie external hard drive. My computer at home
is a PC so I have formatted the hard drive to NTFS to be compatible
with my PC. However, I have a mac in school and all my assignments are
saved there and I would like to be able to transfer them to my external
hard drive.
Does anyone know of a way I can format the hard drive to work both with
Mac and with PC?
Click to expand...

Easy: Use FAT32 as filesystem. You Will have to partition it for that,
since FAT32 has a size limit that, I think, is lower than 300GB.

Arno
 
Easy: Use FAT32 as filesystem. You Will have to partition it for that,
since FAT32 has a size limit that, I think, is lower than 300GB.
Click to expand...

128GB max with FAT32. Sorry but that means losing more than half of
the hard drive.

Unless you need need to transfer really large files, thumbdrive are
cheaper and available up to 1GB+ sizes. All you need is an USB port
on both computers, USB capable OS (Mac OS 8.6 or later, Windows 98se
or later)
 
128GB max with FAT32. Sorry but that means losing more than half of
the hard drive.
Click to expand...

It does not. It just means that you have to put 3 partitions on it
to use its full size. Or you can have one 128MB Mac+Win partition
and one larger win-only NTFS partition.
Unless you need need to transfer really large files, thumbdrive are
cheaper and available up to 1GB+ sizes. All you need is an USB port
on both computers, USB capable OS (Mac OS 8.6 or later, Windows 98se
or later)
Click to expand...

Still need to put FAT32 on it (usually the vendor has already
done this for you), but I agree. Thumbdrives are _very_ handy
and difficult to destroy.

Arno
 
Impmon said:
128GB max with FAT32. Sorry but that means losing more than half of
the hard drive.
Click to expand...

Only on Win 98/ME. Larger volumes are OK on Win 2K/XP, and OsX should too.
 
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