External hard drive that works on Mac AND PC?

I bought an external hard drive. Not sure it's important which and I can't remember.

So I want to use it on a Mac and a PC. I hooked it up to the PC, it worked. I hooked it up to a mac (OS 10? it's old) and it asked me to format it. I said ok.

Now I have a mac formatted hard drive. Only macs can see it. I plug it into a PC, it's invisible. I can't find the drive anywhere.

Any ideas on how to get it to work on both?

 

I purchased a WD Mygig and the Mac saw it just fine. I believe it was formatted FAT32 from the factory. Only when I wanted to use it for Timemachine was I forced to format it. Since I don't care about sharing it with a PC I went ahead and let it format HFS (Mac).

In your case, get your files off and let the PC format it FAT32 and the mac should be able to see it and read and write to it. Time machine won't work with the FAT32 formatted disk but everything else should work.

 

I'd like to try that. But at this point the PC does not see the hard drive. I'll plug it in, the little light on the drive will come on, but the PC does not see it.

It's a little frustrating.

 

It won't get a drive letter unless it's formatted. If you are running xp, plug the usb drive in and head over to administrative tools->computer management->disk management. Your internal drive will show up as disk 0 and your usb drive should show up as unformatted space on disk 1. Right click disk 1 (assuming you verify it IS your usb drive) and pick format and you should be able to make it fat32. Did I mention you should get your mac stuff off of it before formatting it?

 

Ooh! I love you.

Is it pretty much the same running Vista?

Oh and remember, it isn't gay if you say good game after.

 

Yes, format it for FAT32 if you want both operating systems to be able to read and write the external .

 

As stated, FAT32 is the only file system format that both Windows and Mac OS can read and write to. I chose to get a 500 GB drive and have two partitions on it: one in HFS+, one in NTFS. For some reason, at the time, that seemed like the right thing to do. Something about only being able to make a 32 GB partition? Maybe that's a load of hooey.

 

Or you can do it through Disk Utility in OS X.

 

Only during setup of windows XP or W2K it is limited to 32 GB due to the old format utility so you have to use 3rd party tools to format 'unlimited' size partitions, however there is an issue of files not being bigger than 4GB on FAT32, so watch your movie files not getting bigger than that.
I suggest you make a FAT32 partition (accessible to both) and one HFS (without filesize limitations)

 

Rrrriiiggghhhttt that's why I didn't make it FAT32 - I wanted to be able to put videos onto the drive, which could easily exceed 4 GB in size. Thanks!

 

Rock on. I'll try it when I get home from work.

Thanks, all.

 

I have 160GB Maxter Onetouch Mini protable HDD .How can I partition it ? (80GB for NTFS & rest For Mac HFS)

 

I think I partitioned mine as NTFS first in Windows using the Disk Manager, then used the Mac Disk Utility tool to make another HFS+ partition for Time Machine.

 

You can partition it and format it using Disk Utility. Check the Mac Switcher's Guide for a link to guides on how to do that .

 

I just got a WD Passport 320 gig from bestbuy

And I formatted it to NTFS.....it works fine with both Mac OS and Vista

 

Until you want to write something to it from OS X, then you'll have a problem, unless you're using one of those (flaky) 3rd-party software programs.

When I set up my 320 GB external drive, I used Disk Utility to partition about 75 GB (same size as my MBP's OS X partition) for the Mac OS file system. Disk Utility then partitioned the rest of the drive as FAT32. I then booted into XP and used the disk management tool there to format the FAT32 partition to NTFS. That partition is shared between the XP Boot Camp install and my desktop PC, which runs Vista. I have a separate external drive for Time Machine backups.

 

oh

i never tried copying anything on it from mac still

will try it