yet another external HDD question

Hi all,

Just found the forum, hope someone can help me with what is probably a really stupid question.

I've just taken delivery of an 80gb external HDD. It works fine when plugged into the PC laptop (running XP), but when I plug it into my mac (G3 imac 600 running OSX 10.2.8), it comes up as unreadable. It's formatted NTFS, so I'm wondering why the mac won't see it.

Any help much appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Alex.

The reason is that it is formatted to NTFS. OS X 10.2.x can have trouble with this.

Format it to FAT32 to allow OS X to read and write to this drive.

Thanks Zoolook- that makes alot of sense.

Just one small thing- my pc doesn't have an option to format in FAT32, only NTFS. Any ideas how I do this? I do have an old pc laptop running w98, if that would do the job.

Thanks again,

Alex.

you can format it on he mac too.
applications/utilities
use the disk utility app.
you will have the option to format as fat32.

not sure why the xp machine won't do it. i'd bet the old 98 machine would though.

Thanks Eric- I'll have a bash when I get home.

Best to all,

Alex.

Well, I've managed to get the mac to see the drive, and all is functioning well. Woo hoo! Formatted as MS-Dos.

BUT the laptop won't see it now. It's strange- it shows up in the device manager, and is apparently operating properly. Just isn't visible in the drive list.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Alex.