03-21-2010, 08:06 AM

Hi,

I have just bought a WD 1TB My Book Essential HD for my Macbook Pro 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, running Mac OS X 10.5.8

I also have a WD 500Gb HD, that i use for Time Machine and have noticed that it does not show up on a PC when plugged in.

I would like to use my new drive on both PC and Mac, for movies, music etc... and am wondering if I need to format it differently to avoid having the same problem.

Or should I leave the standard HFS+J formatting it comes with ?

Cheers

Mike

03-21-2010, 08:42 AM

I believe you must format the HD to FAT32 if you want to use it on both PCs and Macs.

I would check the Western Digital Web Site as they might clarify the formatting options for you.

DavidH

03-21-2010, 08:59 AM

If you keep it HFS, Windows out of the box can not read it. You have a few options.

First FAT32. Both OSX and Windows will both read and write to the drive with FAT32. Only downside is if you work with LARGE single files 4GB or higher each, FAT32 can not write a single file over 4GB. If that will never be an issue, FAT32 is the best way and the easiest also.

You can keep it at Mac OSX Extended (Journalized) and purchase a application for Windows called MacDrive and then it will both read and write to the OSX formatted drive.

You can also plug it into the Windows machine and format it NTFS. OSX will by default read but not write to an NTFS partition. If you are running Snow Leopard, you can easily enable R/W support for NTFS. If you are running Leopard or Tiger there is other software to enable NTFS R/W support.

If the 4GB single filesize limit is not an issue, just go with FAT32. Everything will read/write to it!

03-21-2010, 09:00 AM

The My Book HDD will formatted for Mac as default, so David suggestion above is what you need to do in order to use on both, Windows, and Mac OS X Environments.

03-21-2010, 08:15 PM

Thank you everyone for your posts.

I formatted the disk as FAT32 in 'Disk Utility'.

I was told that file size transfer is limited to 4GB but thats fine. I also found out from WD support that Time Machine cannot be used with that Format. Luckily i have another WD drive dedicated for that.

Thank you again.

Mike