goint to pull my hair out

can anyone tell me how to format a drive in leopard , so i can use it on my pc using vista . i need it to work on both , i have a 2gb pen drive that works fine on both . i have tried to format the as dos but it dont show up in my pc when connected

please help

You mean use Bootcamp ?

powermacj7 said:

You mean use Bootcamp ?

Click to expand...

no sorry i mean a external drive , i want to use it on both pc and mac , i had a thought will i need to parrtition it into 4 smaller drives because its 320gb i dunno

Applications >> Utilities >> Disk Utility

Under the partitions Tab; Partition the disk the way you would like
Under the Erase Tab: Choose MSDOS (FAT)

I don't remember the max size for a FAT32 partition offhand, so you may have to experiment just a little bit.

For FAT32 the maximum capacity is 112GB if Im correctly.. Everything that exceeds the 112Gb limit, needs to be formatted using the NTFS file system but cant be written to by OSX. You should visit the Disk Utility more often though. Because you need to Repair Disk Permissions once in awhile

If you find you really need to format it as NFTS there is a way to get OS X to write to an NTFS partition

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/li...write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html

I wrote a "mini how-to" on how to do exactly that
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=521912#post521912

Yhtomit said:

For FAT32 the maximum capacity is 112GB if Im correctly.. Everything that exceeds the 112Gb limit, needs to be formatted using the NTFS file system but cant be written to by OSX. You should visit the Disk Utility more often though. Because you need to Repair Disk Permissions once in awhile

Click to expand...

That is actually not correct. I do not know what the max limit is (if there is one) but I have a FAT32 partition that is more than 130GB.

Yeah was going to say FAT32. I always thought there was some kind of limit with this as well.

However, I have an external 250GB hard drive, that works on both my Mac and my Windows laptop.

For me there was no problem. It was simply a matter of formatting it on my Windows machine, and it just worked on my Mac! So it works no problem on both.

I must say though, I have two other 500GB external drives that I have formatted for the Mac, in the Journaled format, and the speed difference is remarkably increased, especially when searching - to that of the drive that works on both. Perhaps this is a very obvious statement to make but however

Hope you get sorted.

I would strongly discourage anyone from using FAT32 due to its limitations, some severe. FAT32 partitions get increasingly slower and inefficient with drive sizes larger than 32Gb for starters. It doesn't have some security features that NTFS offers. And it's far more susceptible to file corruptions.

Here's a detailed article that explains the differences between FAT32 and NTFS. Especially informative/interesting is one section that describes how NTFS is actually more compatible with the way Macs write file data than FAT32 is.
http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?...85b0 792122fb

OS X has built-in support to read NTFS volumes, but you can enable OS X to have write access to NTFS volumes by installing a couple free packages called MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. You will have to format in NTFS using Windows though.

I have 400GB of hard drive formatted in FAT32. Shouldn't be an issue

Yeah I have an external drive split into NTFS and FAT 32 and its fine.

You have to use FAT 32 if you want to be able to read and write on both the PC and Mac.

mackbook1 said:

can anyone tell me how to format a drive in leopard , so i can use it on my pc using vista . i need it to work on both , i have a 2gb pen drive that works fine on both . i have tried to format the as dos but it dont show up in my pc when connected

please help

Click to expand...

As as I know, in Disk Utility , you need to select an option there , and choose "For GUI" so it can also show up in PC. Then choose MSDOS. That is, if you're using a Mac Intel processor. For older power pc macs, you don't need to select "GUI" . I have a FAT32 external HD and it works fine on both Mac and PC.