how to format external HD?

[emt8q5]

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent external hard drive. I am wondering what the choice for format is if I want to have read/write access in both windows and OS X?

Thanks!

 

[Eidorian]

It should already be in FAT32 format.

 

[DoFoT9]

yea if its already been formatted as fat32 by the manufactorers both xp and osx will be able to read/write.. any other format and you will get difficulties arising from either oneof those OS's

 

[jackiecanev2]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; SprintPC-6700; PPC; 240x320))

if you want to reformat again into fat32 later, you can use swissknife from your windows pc. its notoriously difficult to format fat32 to drives over a certain (menial) size.

 

[DoFoT9]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; SprintPC-6700; PPC; 240x320))

if you want to reformat again into fat32 later, you can use swissknife from your windows pc. its notoriously difficult to format fat32 to drives over a certain (menial) size.

on a pc it is... if you were to format any harddrive on osx using disk utility the size is limitless.

 

[ab2650]

on a pc it is... if you were to format any harddrive on osx using disk utility the size is limitless.

Limitless with current hard drive sizes. Isn't there a 2TB or 4TB limit to volumes in FAT32?

On the subject, anyone remember that Win98 could format FAT32 up to 100+GB, and suddenly Win2k maxed out at 32GB 'forcing' people to adopt NTFS? I really hope MSFT gets nailed some day.

 

[DoFoT9]

Limitless with current hard drive sizes. Isn't there a 2TB or 4TB limit to volumes in FAT32?

On the subject, anyone remember that Win98 could format FAT32 up to 100+GB, and suddenly Win2k maxed out at 32GB 'forcing' people to adopt NTFS? I really hope MSFT gets nailed some day.

oh they are getting nailed, its a silences 9mm nailgun trust me, its happening.

tehcnically its a 16TiB limit... which i think is the same as 16terabits.... so yea about 2terabytes.
my mistake its actually 8terabytes...

max individual file size of 2GB