Formating a Hard Drive w/ a mac for the first time, I need help

I need to format a hard drive so that it will be readable and writeable by both a mac and a pc. Is this possible?

Yes, use the fat32 format, I believe it is the dos formatunder the disk utility application.

What did I do? My hard drive does not show up on my disk utilites or on my desktop on my mac and on my PC it can't even find the thing. Correction disk utility does see it, it shows up in the side bar but none of the buttons are lit, you know the repair buttons fix permissions and such. I swapped out my hard drive and used this ExHD as a bootable source. Everything went perfect but now I plugged in my HD a couple of months later to do a back up and Shazaam nothing. What'd I do?

In Disk Utility, have you selected the Erase "tab"? This is the one that will let you reformat the drive. Try this and report back if it will let you.

What does worry me about what you seeing is that the drive doesn't appear to have any partitions on it - either a completely fresh drive or it has a corrupted partition table. This is why Windows doesn't see it - no partitions.

You may need to get something like PartitionMagic to format this thing, or use a Linux distro to do the same thing via QtParted.

I have had this happen to me once before. The Mac would successfully format and use the drive as is, without any entries in the partition table, but the Windows box was too stupid and couldn't see it. I eventually had to haul out a Linux distro (in this case SuSE Linux, and its YaST Partitioner) to reformat and rebuild the partition table.

This may be tough - good luck!

ID.10.T error!!

I must have been sniffing glue...I never thought to just reformat it by erasing it. Thanks for pointing out the obvious:blind:
I was starting to think I created a bigger problem than I really had. After erasing it it made a partition and now it popped up on my desktop as ExHD as I just labeled it.

Excellent, glad I could help! Enjoy your drive!

same problem

thank you, I had the same problem.
I was going to destroy my new external hard-drive until I found your thread.
The magical "erase" button worked also for me!

Great - I am glad this has helped so many people!