Windows Format Portable HDD On A Mac

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Hi,

I've recently moved across to a mac and am hoping someone can offer some advice on it's interaction with a portable HDD.

I moved all my music and photos etc across using my portable HDD from my old windows laptop to my mac's HD. The portable HDD is formatted as NTFS and it seems because of this I cannot delete any files from it whilst it's attached to the Mac.

I've read that a program called Macfuse can overcome this, has anyone used this program and would you recommend it?

Also, ideally, I'd like to be able to use the smaller portable HDD on both my home mac and work windows machine, moving, copying, deleting files etc as I need to. Is this possible?

Thanks, Brian
 
vansmith

vansmith

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Take a look at this.

If you want to use a drive across OSes, format it as FAT32. Note that one of the major limitations of FAT32 is that you can't store a file larger than 4GB on a drive formatted as such.
 
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vansmith said:
Take a look at this.

If you want to use a drive across OSes, format it as FAT32. Note that one of the major limitations of FAT32 is that you can't store a file larger than 4GB on a drive formatted as such.
Click to expand...


Cheers, sorry for being dumb but am I correct in thinking that if I reformat the portable HDD then I'll need to have moved everything off of it first otherwise it will be deleted?

Will the NTFS Mounter also allow me to delete files as well as loading them on the portable HDD?

Thanks
 
vansmith

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Yes, reformatting will delete the contents of the hard drive. If you choose to reformat it, you should move the contents of the drive elsewhere in the meantime.

Yes, NTFS mounter will mount the NTFS drive with read/write support.
 
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crosby


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21.5-inch: 3.06GHz, 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo,4GB memory, 500GB hard drive
vansmith said:
Yes, reformatting will delete the contents of the hard drive. If you choose to reformat it, you should move the contents of the drive elsewhere in the meantime.

Yes, NTFS mounter will mount the NTFS drive with read/write support.
Click to expand...

Thanks, rather than reformat I'll give the NTFS Mounter a go and see how I get on.

Thanks again!
 

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