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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Consumer Hardware & Components > external usb HD is now mostly useless...formatting?

external usb HD is now mostly useless...formatting?
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talkingcrepe
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Feb 12, 2005, 09:22 PM
 
i've been searching through this forum and people are having the same problem i am. but i have a twist at the end. a few months ago i bought an 80 gig external usb hard drive by WESTERN DIGITAL. i was using it to move stuff back and forth between my cube and my brothers vaio (PC). and it worked just fine. i could read/write from both machines.

then (for reasons to complicated to explain) i switched out the drive in the enclosure for another 80 gig bare SEAGATE drive i had laying around. the newly configured external drive showed up on my mac, bud did not show up on the pc. so then i reformatted it using the pc (running xp) ta da! it showed up and all was well. then i hooked it up to the cube and i can only READ from it.

---TWIST----

i understand if the drive is formatted in NTFS the mac can only read, and if i format it with FAT32 i'll have to have a crap load of partitions.

my question is how was the drive formatted when i bought it? it worked on both pc and mac as a go between with however it was set up. how can i get it back to the way it was formatted, and how was it formatted to begin with?

thanks in advance,
p
     
SWFan
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Feb 12, 2005, 09:28 PM
 
It was clearly formatted FAT32 before. I'm not sure why you think if you use FAT32 you'll have to have dozens of partitions. 80GB can be made as one partition under FAT32. Heck, FAT32 will support 2TB sized drives, 80GB is nothing.
     
talkingcrepe  (op)
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Feb 12, 2005, 09:41 PM
 
the thing is i tried reformatting the drive in windows disk management, and it will only allow me to format as NTFS. FAT32 is not given as an option. can i format it as FAT32 from my mac under disk utility?

and if not, how can i do it from the pc? my brain hurts.
     
SWFan
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Feb 12, 2005, 11:37 PM
 
What version of Windows are you using? Win98/ME will allow you to fdisk and format the drive as one big FAT32 partition. I think the partition limit of FAT32 you were referring to is one built-in to Win2K & XP. Both will recognize huge FAT32 partitions, but neither is allowed to create FAT32 partitions over 32GB's. OS X has no built-in capability of creating FAT32 partitions.

The easiest method might be to pull the drive out of the FW enclosure and mount it in a PC as the primary drive, then boot the computer with a Win98 created boot disk with fdisk and format loaded on it. Partition and format. Pull the drive, put it back in the FW enclosure and you should be good to go.
     
SWFan
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Feb 12, 2005, 11:49 PM
 
I did find this article on the Internet. You may find it useful.

http://home.earthlink.net/~athene/no...wfs_msdos.html
     
   
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