External Hard Drive

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I have an external hard drive that I have been using on a windows laptop. This has a lot if data held on it which I have to keep.
How do I format the drive so i can write to it from my iMac and also keep the data on the drive?
 
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Welcome to the forums.

If you format your drive, then the data is gone.

If the external drive is formatted as FAT32, you can read and write to it directly from your iMac, with one limitation and that is that a single file can not exceed 4 GB in size.

Alternatively, what you can do is ..
1) copy the data off that external drive to another drive
2) format the external drive using the HFS+ file system
3) copy the data back onto the newly formatted drive.

Hope this helps.

Cheers ... McBie
 
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Ne need to format. I have a 3 TB external and had the same question. It is formatted NTFS for Windows and I can read and write without issue.
If you're willing to spend $20.00, your answer is here: NTFS for Mac®

Best $20.00 I ever spent.
 

chscag

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+1 for Paragon NTFS. It just works.
 

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