Formatting external hard drive

Hi, I am using an iMac with latest version of iOS. I have bought an external hard drive to put content on from my computer and have read to format with disk utility and erase the hard drive and reformat as Mac OS extended (journaled). I would also like to be able to access some of the content on my smart TV, my photos and home movies etc but the smart TV (LG) does not seem to be able to read the hard drive once I have reformatted. it. Is there a different format I should be using.

Try formatting the drive as NTFS. I also read something which implied that drives larger than 2 TB might have difficulty.

If you are going to use the TimeMachine II recording feature be aware that drives used for that feature will not be read by computers.

I wonder Sly.

After digital download I burnt Office 2011 to a USB thumb drive and wrote activation code from the email from Microsoft.. Think many folk do this setting up for the rainy day? Got quite a collection, Yosemite, Office, DiskWarrior, TechToolPro and Disk Drill all on thumb drives.

Oops thats a typo harry. The recommendation is less than 2 TB. The recommendations can be found here

We recommend using a USB device with a capacity of between 40 GB and 2 TB.
SSDs have limited recording/deleting capabilities. We recommend using an HDD.
To remove a USB device, select Quick Menu > USB Device > Eject and wait for the message notifying you that the USB device may be safely removed before disconnecting it.
The format used by Time Machine II is not compatible with ordinary PCs.
Defective sectors in the USB device may cause Time Machine II to cease functioning properly.

Click to expand...

Thanks for all you suggestions.

In case anyone else reads this with the same problem I have come across a really cool and relatively easy solution on a support forum for my LG smart TV, and it worked perfectly.

You need to partition the external hard drive. Make on partition as small as you can because you will not be using it. Format that one EXFAT using you disk utility on you mac. If you do not know how to find this just type it into spotlight search (search icon in menu bar top right of you screen) and it will come up. Then format the other partition MS-DOS (FAT). This will allow your mac to use the hard drive and your windows compatible TV (or other device I assume) to read it.

Obviously you only copy content into the larger partition.

I have only tried this on my LG smart TV so no guarantees!!

That's a great piece of detective work. I'll have to remember that if we finally get around to buying a smart tv.