trying to decide how/if I should bother formating my external....

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Hi there, I hope I'm not beating a dead horse here, but I am having some trouble finding out the answers to a few questions, I'm not saying they are not out there, just that I haven't found them. :]

I have an external 160gb WesternDigital My Book essential. Its currently NTVS format. My main desktop is WindowsXP home. I also have a Macbook that I have been using more and more. I have read that I would need to do a FAT32 format on the external drive if I wanted to be able to read and write on both my windows machine, and my macbook. With FAT32, can I still do a full backup of my windows harddrive? I have read that file sizes are limited to 4gb with FAT32 so i was wondering if it is still possible to backup my 60+ gig worth of windows harddrive stuff on FAT32. If no, is there anyway I could partition some of the external drive for NTVS format so I could still do my large windows backup (60gig+), while keeping a partition with FAT32 so I could still do minor backups and transfers between the windows desktop and my macbook? My computer knowledge is at least average, but I have also never had an external to use before and I am not sure if one drive can even have both file systems on it as I have suggested here. Both of my machines are completely up-to-date, and my macbook is running OSx 10.4

Thank you ahead of time to anyone who might be able to shed some light on this for me.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    Hello and welcome! Here is the deal: Macs and Windows can read/write FAT32 drives, Windows can't see HFS+ and Macs can't write to NTFS without third party software. His excellency Bill Gates crippled FAT32 so that it is limited to 32 gig partitions if you format it from your Windoze machine. However, if you format it on your Mac the volume size limit is in the terabyte range.. The file size limit is 4 gigs on either platform.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    Hi again, and thanks for the info. This may be redundant of me to ask, but would the 4gb file size limit, and I am guessing it will, affect my ability to use windows backup wizard to do a full backup (60gig or so)? Will it automatically pick up that for FAT32 it would have to do multiple separate files to do the full backup, or is this asking too much of windows? :]

    I am also still wondering if I am able to do say half my external drive NTVS and the other half FAT32, as it is only my windows machine which would require the large amount of space it seems I would need NTVS for too do the full backup of my windows machine. My macbook I only need to be able to backup relatively small files, etc, which FAT32 would be fine for my needs in that respect. Thanks again ahead of time for any further insight into this!
  • Reply 3 of 3
    smaxsmax Posts: 361member
    Set up your external drive with 3 partitions:



    1 NTFS for XP backup

    1 HFS+ for OSX backup. You can ven clone the whole drive to this partition and boot from it if you wanted...

    1 FAT for files shared between both OSes.



    It's a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll.
Sign In or Register to comment.