Use External HDD with mac and pc

Joined
May 12, 2007
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Your Mac's Specs
17" MacBookPro 2.33 GHz, 2 GB Ram 160 GB HDD, 320 GB Time Machine HDD, 750 GB External HDD
Hi all,

How do I use a external Hard drive with both my mac and my pc. Right now it is working with my mac fine but when I plug it into my pc the pc can not even see it. I check the drive with the disk utility and it says it formatted in the journaled format. I have tried erasing it into the ms-dos format but does not work. I select the ms-dos and hit erase and in a few seconds it says its done but it resets itself as journaled. What am I doing wrong. I need to get this HDD erased and in a format that can be read and written to by both my mac and pc.
 
OP
M
Joined
May 12, 2007
Messages
102
Reaction score
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Your Mac's Specs
17" MacBookPro 2.33 GHz, 2 GB Ram 160 GB HDD, 320 GB Time Machine HDD, 750 GB External HDD
I dont know if this matters but I need to do this so I can transfer my itunes from my pc to my mac. My itunes lib. is about 40 gigs and the external HDD is 160 gigs.
 

CrimsonRequiem


Retired Staff
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Your Mac's Specs
MBP 2.3 Ghz 4GB RAM 860 GB SSD, iMac 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 32GB RAM, Fusion Drive 1TB
You need to partition your external HDD using disk utilities.

Control + Click on your HDD and you should see a list of things you can do. Go down to where it says Partition.

Under Volume Scheme is a drop down list. You want to scroll down to two or how ever many partitions you want to make. Seeing as you just want to use it for your Mac and PC, I think two is enough.

After you finish making your partitions you click on each one and give it a name, and select what kind of partition you want it to be. For your Mac you probably want Mac OS Extended Journaled and you get to pick how many much space you want to allocate to that partition.

You do the same thing for the 2nd partition except under format you want it to be MS-DOS FAT.

That pretty much sums it up, your Mac will be able to read both of the partitions but your PC will only read the FAT partition. You need to keep this in mind.
 
Joined
Oct 9, 2008
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Your Mac's Specs
13" MBP, 2.53 Ghz, 4 Gb Ram, 500 Gb HDD
You need to partition your external HDD using disk utilities.

Control + Click on your HDD and you should see a list of things you can do. Go down to where it says Partition.

Under Volume Scheme is a drop down list. You want to scroll down to two or how ever many partitions you want to make. Seeing as you just want to use it for your Mac and PC, I think two is enough.

After you finish making your partitions you click on each one and give it a name, and select what kind of partition you want it to be. For your Mac you probably want Mac OS Extended Journaled and you get to pick how many much space you want to allocate to that partition.

You do the same thing for the 2nd partition except under format you want it to be MS-DOS FAT.

That pretty much sums it up, your Mac will be able to read both of the partitions but your PC will only read the FAT partition. You need to keep this in mind.

Yeah then when you go into windows, format your HDD from Ms-Dos to the other format. I cant think of it right now lol.
 

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