hard drive mac to windows

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mary.lanemary.lane
Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
hi everybody



i have a hitachi hard drive and as far as i know is it just for mac to use. But i need to use it for pc and mac!

in the beginig i couldn't even see the hard drive on my pc. Then i downloaded macdrive8 everything worked. i tried to change the format from the drive to fat32 and erased it. but now i can't even see my hard disk on the pc anymore!!! o.O can anyone help me please???

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Make it FAT32 using either your Mac or PC. Both OS' can read and write FAT32.
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  • Reply 2 of 6
    kingofsomewherehotkingofsomewherehot Posts: 4,185member
    If you can access it via Mac... using Disk Utility... there is an "options" button on either the "Partition" page that will allow you to select "Master Boot Record" as the partition scheme. That (combined with FAT32) seems to give the best compatibility across platforms... the caveat being that you won't be able to Boot OSX from that drive (unlikely scenario.)



    I'm sure you can do the same thing from within Windows, but I couldn't say where to find the right options there.
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  • Reply 3 of 6
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    Make it FAT32 using either your Mac or PC. Both OS' can read and write FAT32.



    Better yet, download and install NTFS-3G. This will allow the OP to format, read, and write NTFS volumes. The preferred file system of Windows is NTFS. With NTFS-3G installed, the Mac can handle removable NTFS volumes easier than Windows.
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  • Reply 4 of 6
    tontontonton Posts: 14,067
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mr. Me View Post


    Better yet, download and install NTFS-3G. This will allow the OP to format, read, and write NTFS volumes. The preferred file system of Windows is NTFS. With NTFS-3G installed, the Mac can handle removable NTFS volumes easier than Windows.



    +1



    I agree that NTFS is the way to go through this method. NTFS is a much better fit with Mac than the severely limited FAT32 (all caps, no files larger than 4GB).
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  • Reply 5 of 6
    mimacmimac Posts: 872member
    NTFS-3G seems to be the way to go.
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  • Reply 6 of 6
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by carolibartels View Post


    I recently bought a 250GB hard drive for my Apple iMac, and I want to take the 160GB hard drive that is in there now, and make it formatted to a PC (windows XP) How do I do that? I checked the disk utility, and it only will let me format it to a Mac format.



    Reread Post #4.
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