External HD NTFS

[airjuggernaut]

ok, so here's my problem.
I have an External HD that I've had for quite a while, way before I got a mac.
I never knew I would get a Mac, so i stupidly went ahead and formatted that external hard drive to NTFS.
Now that I have a Mac, my Mac Refuses to write to it(I knew that it would do this before hand), and I have A LOT of data on my external HD, so it's not something that I can easily wipe out and change its format, I also dont have an internal harddrive that's big enough, that would allow me to facilitate the files while i reformatted it.
Is there anyway I can change the Filesystem to FAT32 from NTFS without deleting my data?

Thanks

 

[airfang]

there are softwares that allow you to write to NTFS drives in OS X... forgot their names though...I will let ppl below answer that part

 

[Neil321]

ok, so here's my problem.
I have an External HD that I've had for quite a while, way before I got a mac.
I never knew I would get a Mac, so i stupidly went ahead and formatted that external hard drive to NTFS.
Now that I have a Mac, my Mac Refuses to write to it(I knew that it would do this before hand), and I have A LOT of data on my external HD, so it's not something that I can easily wipe out and change its format, I also dont have an internal harddrive that's big enough, that would allow me to facilitate the files while i reformatted it.
Is there anyway I can change the Filesystem to FAT32 from NTFS without deleting my data?

Thanks

paragon ( not to stable ) and i think macdrive 7 (this is a windows app so would need bootcamp ) not sure about changing from one file system to another without loosing data but i doubt it

 

[aiterum]

macdrive7 is for creating an HSF+ partition on your hard drive and letting windows write to it. OSX will write to it natively (Although for best results you're better off booting to OSX and formating it to HSFJ (journaled) and then Macdrive will read i fine in windows. as far as I know you can't format to journaled in macdrive on windows.

I think you can use partition magic and resize a partition without reformating, but you'll have to restart, and then reformat the unallocated part that you created. Note that Partition magic won't read an HSF partition. Also, if you are going to format to FAT32, be warned that in windows you can't have files bigger than 4gb. You can format above 32gb if you use partition magic however. Also, FAT32 is a lot less stable than NTFS or HSF

 

[Bill Gates]

There is a piece of software in this very forum that I've used that does the job very well of writing to NTFS partitions under OS X. Also, you could try a free solution like NTFS-3G. That also works well, although it's not plug-and-play like Anatoly's NTFS program.