HD Format?

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i just bought an external hard drive (500 GB) and was wondering what the format should be. my pc needs it to be in ntsf so i formated it to that setting but when i plugged it into my apple the drive only allowed me to read the files. i wanna be able to read and write all my files in both computers.

Thanks!
slim
 

RTP


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Hi

To be able to use the drive on both Windows and OSX you'll need to format it to the FAT filesystem.

You should do it on your Mac using Disk Utility (choose MSDOS format), because Windows doesn't let you format a single FAT partition bigger than 32GB.

Back-up your data before you format the disk - formatting it will erase everything on there.

Alternatively, you can partition the drive and have the different partitions formatted in different filesystems (e.g., one FAT, one HFS+, one NTFS, or whatever). If you search the forums you'll find a lot of discussions about this
 
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FAT or you could partition...Mac and Win....two sections.
 
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i dont have a mac (yet) but you can format it to ext2/ext3 (linux filesystem). since mac is a unix variant, i think it can read/write on those fs. for windows, there is a program called IFS drive that you can download, so you can mount a ext2/ext3 usb drive.

i used to have a nas drive that is ext2 formatted. i had IFS drive installed in windows XP so that i can use the nas drive as usb drive too and have read/write access to it. but that was a year ago, so i dont know the progress with regards to the IFS program. you can search google for more info. hth.
 
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Right now, the only way for a Mac to write to NTFS is to serve the drive over a network. The only way for a PC to read/write HFS is to install third party software such as MacDrive.
Leopard (10.5) promises to allow NTFS write.
 
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Leopard (10.5) promises to allow NTFS write.

You sure about that? Microsoft hasn't given people the rights to use NTFS which is the reason we haven't been able to write to NTFS drives yet, its not something apple has to decide to program
 
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Of course I'm sure! I was sure that Leopard and the iPhone were going to be released in April 2007.... You are right, I should have phrased that differently. It is a widely hoped for rumor.
 
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You sure about that? Microsoft hasn't given people the rights to use NTFS which is the reason we haven't been able to write to NTFS drives yet, its not something apple has to decide to program

Actually, full read/write NTFS support was just added to Linux, so it's not that difficult to imagine Leopard also having this capability
 
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yea NTFS-3g. Even the read support in Panther/Tiger is via a licensed utility from FreeBSD but Microsoft will not release the code to allow it to work
 
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slim91
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is there another type of format which allows me to read and write in both win and mac and upload files bigger than 2 gb?
 

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