Reformat partition of external drive to work with Win 7?

[Beric]

So I have an external firewire drive I use for all my Time Machine backups in OS X. It's formatted in the typical Mac journaled format or whatever it is. I have 2 partitions, one with my Time Machine backup. I booted in Windows 7, and intended to reformat the other partition to work with Windows, but it didn't want to let me change that partition, though it did recognize it as an OS X format.

Any help? I don't want to have to start from scratch, as it took a LONG time to get the stuff I have backed up onto the TM partition.

 

[aluminumapple]

someone had a similar problem like this

did you change the settings at Security and set it to a Windows instead of Mac Journal partition?

 

[Beric]

So in OS X, I have 5 options for formatting the partition. The top four are OS X-related, and the bottom one is MS-DOS. I want either FAT32, or even better, NTFS. But Windows won't let me change the OS X -formatted partition to a different format, and none of the formats OS X will let me do are what I want.

 

[Beric]

Disappointed no one ever had a tip. I don't want to mess up my drive and risk losing everything by taking a risk. Anyone else got any tips on how to get my partition to reformat?

 

[Neil321]

You do know that MS-DOS is FAT32,right ?

 

[steveza]

In disk utility you can format the partition as FAT32. Windows 7 should be able to read and write to this partition and it will still be accessible by OS X.

You can convert the partition to NTFS from Windows 7 but then you will not (without additional software) be able to see it from OS X.

 

[GeekSquadCIA]

Reformatting the partition

You can reformat it (like others have said previously) to FAT32 by choosing the MSDOS format on Disk Utility, but to be able to access that partition using your Mac OS, you have to make sure that the partition is less than 32GB. If you partition it to be over 32GB, the Mac OS won't be able to read it. Once you have partitioned it to MS-DOS, then you can load Windows 7 and it will automatically allow you to format it to NTFS. Hope this helps. If not, send me a message and I will see what I can do to help.

 

[Beric]

So MS-DOS IS Fat32! Would have known it.

Sorry guys, I've grown up solely in the Mac world.

Thanks a lot for the help!

*starts up disk utility and gets at it*