bought a drive for mac/pc now what?

sheepsheep
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
ok... i gave up trying to reformat the other drive - it's a long story i'll save you from. my question now is, how should i format this new drive so it will be compatible with my pc? i'm planning on formatting it in osx, then taking it to the pc to load it with images, then back to the mac for viewing and emailing. it says on the seagate website to use 'mac os extended' format for the most compatibility, but will my two year old pc recognize it when i get it there? i have no internet on that station, so i can't download an update. any advice? thanks...

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,326moderator
    It should be MS-DOS format (FAT32) - it does have a 4GB file size limit you should be aware of though.



    MS-DOS (FAT32): read/write on both Mac/PC but 4GB file limit

    HFS+ (Mac OS Extended): Windows doesn't support it unless you use Macdrive software ( http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/ )

    NTFS (most popular Windows filesystem): no 4 GB limit but read-only on OS X.



    MS-DOS is the best option and is what I use for my Bootcamp partition. If you need to deal with files over 4GB, use HFS+ and get Macdrive.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    lundylundy Posts: 4,466member
    Leopard writes NTFS. Yay.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    sheepsheep Posts: 17member
    well i ended up staying with the fat-32 (or so i thought). turns out it's loaded with ntfs instead. it's fine, osx read it, but it's true, i can't write to it. so for now it remains a carrying device, but eventually i'll wipe it and reformat it osx extended (journaled). i thought it should be fat-32, and i made sure to boot it up on the mac first, but for some reason it's all ntfs. which for some reason always looks like an acronym.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,326moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by lundy View Post


    Leopard writes NTFS. Yay.



    9A499? That's great to hear because 9A466 didn't work for me. It would have really surprised me if Leopard didn't have it because now that they are including Bootcamp, it makes sense to support the most popular filesystem to transfer files easily.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sheep


    it's all ntfs. which for some reason always looks like an acronym.



    They're all acronyms. NTFS = Newbie Training filesystem; HFS = Hierarchical filesystem etc.
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