External disk

I'm currently using an external disk as back-up with Time machine and I also put movies on it to declutter my laptop. I recently noticed when trying to share a movie with a friend that it's not detected by PCs.

Is there a way to do so without having to erase the disk?

 

PCs cannot read Mac formatted drives. You need to install software on the PC to read the HFS mac formatting. While Macs can read NTFS and read/write to FAT32 format drives used by windows, it doesn't work the other way around.

If you don't want to purchase software and just need to share a single large file ( doing this with a copyrighted film is illegal) the easiest way to accomplish that is to write it onto a USB flash drive, generally 8GB or more.

 

To make it universal (without having to install HSF software on every PC you wana use it on) You could simply partition your hard drive

 

I agree. Making one fat partition that both OS's can read/write to is very effective

 

I have a 320GB hard drive I use to backup my MBP. I just made two partitions. One is 250 GB which is where I back up using Time Machine and the other 70GB I use to store random files and videos I want to take with me. Format the 70GB to NTFS or Fat32 and Windows will read it just fine.

 

just everyone remember that Time Machine requires a HFS drive... so you really do have to partition it... and it only backs up them too... I had FAT drives that i wanted backed up.. and Time Machine wont do it...

 

And do I use Disk Utility do partition the drive?

 

yes, you can set up a partition in disk utility... set up one up for time machine thats HFS+ with journalling (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)), then set another up for just temp data storage as FAT32 (MS-DOS (FAT))

 

So I tried this morning to partition the external drive... twice. Both times I got an error message telling me the drive didn't have any free space, which isn't true. I have 100 gb of free space and tried to partition a 70gb space of FAT 32.

Should I erase the external drive first?

 

when it says free space.. its talking about actual unpartitioned space.. not just unused space inside a partition. On the partition tab you can resize the partition there to be smaller first (just dragging the bottom right corner of the diagram up like resizing a window), then add a new partition in the free (unpartitioned) space.

 

Thats exactly what I did, by default it just fills up everything that is not partitionned Mac, so I resized it smaller to still have room for Time Machine backups, but I got the error message.

 

you can try starting from scratch.. but i just tested it on my external boot camp drive.. it let me resize it down and add a FAT partition without any errors... so not sure... trying making the fat one slightly larger? ... sometimes cant make super little partitions with it for some reason... wouldnt even let me 1TB drive have less than 100GB for an extra partition...

 

Hmmm I see...
I might try from scratch when I'll manage to back up everything that's on the drive, it doesn't all fit on my laptop lol

 

So it worked after emptying it.
Thank you for your help!