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so.. I built myself an external hard drive... FW case and spare 20GB hard drive which was lying around. I formatted it NTFS via my PC and put it in there... works flawlessly on my PC.
however, when I plug it into my mac.. it says it needs to be initialized... i thought Macs mounted all PC volumes? No? Should I format Fat32 instead? It needs to go cross platform.
FAT32 should work.. as far as I know, the Mac can't read NTFS (anyone disagree?). I've taken friends' FAT32 drives, their Windows boot drives, and backed up their stuff on my Mac without problems.
Originally posted by macgyvr64: FAT32 should work.. as far as I know, the Mac can't read NTFS (anyone disagree?). I've taken friends' FAT32 drives, their Windows boot drives, and backed up their stuff on my Mac without problems.
You're right, Macs can't read NTFS. FAT32 support is a little finicky sometimes too.
The usual options for this situation are:
Format has HFS+ (native Mac format) and use MacDrive to read the drive on a Windows PC
Partition the drive so you've got a HFS+ partition and a FAT32 partition. When you need to transfer something, just copy it to the FAT32 partition when using a Mac, or put it on the FAT32 partition when using a PC
Format the whole drive as FAT32. Not the best idea, since things work best with HFS+.
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