i have just bought and external hard drive and want to put stuff on it. i kno i hav to format it somehow using disk utility on my imac. what do i format it to so i can use it on both mac and pc? it is set to read only in "get info" and ms-dos fat in disk utility.
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imac external hard drive and pc
- Thread starter andrewline6
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You need to reformat it as FAT to have easy cross-platform compatibility. If it's read-only right now that probably means it's NTFS.
PCs have problems with FAT32 (at least I had) but it should work in both.
Does NTFS work well in both?
Does NTFS work well in both?
I use macfuse and NTFS 3-g my external hard drives are formatted for NTFS.
I can write and read from both windows and mac side. BEWARE that writing or reading from a mac using macfuse+NTFS 3g will be slower than reading or writing it from windows. Also you should always eject the drives after you used them from windows side, because disconnected without ejection drive will give you error message and fail to show up on a mac.
I can write and read from both windows and mac side. BEWARE that writing or reading from a mac using macfuse+NTFS 3g will be slower than reading or writing it from windows. Also you should always eject the drives after you used them from windows side, because disconnected without ejection drive will give you error message and fail to show up on a mac.
i reformatted it is FAT and it now lets me put stuff onto the hard drive. but i havent yet tried it on a pc. what is ntfs that others are talking about?
NTFS is the format Windows uses as default. It can only be read by OS X and not written to (unless you download MacFuse and NTFS-3G).