[apt]

Once a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Hard Drive has been formatted for a PC - can it be converted/re-formatted to be used on a Mac G4? In other words, does anyone know of a way (software or otherwise) to convert a NTSC formatted hard drive to a FAT / FAT 32 hard drive.

The hard drive has been set up externally on a PC and I would like to use it as an external for my G4 iBook.

Some please heeeeelp.

Sophie

[mduell]

No, an NTFS partition cannot be converted to FAT. But you can reformat the drive as FAT32 on your mac, and use the drive with both platforms. Keep in mind that reformatting will erase all data on the drive, so make a backup first.

[polendo]

Like mduell said, you have two practical choices:

A. Format it as Fat32 and your MAc and PC can read & write to it,
or
B. You can format it as a Mac OS Plus and only your Mac can read and write to it.

Use the Disk Utility app under Utilities to format your external HD.

regards

[mduell]

Originally Posted by polendo

Like mduell said, you have two practical choices:

A. Format it as Fat32 and your MAc and PC can read & write to it,
or
B. You can format it as a Mac OS Plus and only your Mac can read and write to it.

Use the Disk Utility app under Utilities to format your external HD.

regards

Another option is leaving it as NTFS, in which case his Mac can read it but not write to it.

[WitchKing]

NTFS cannot be converted to Fat32 natively by Windows. But there are third party applications that can accomplish the task, Partition Magic being one of them.