HD Format question

dukebound85

macrumors Core

Original poster

• Feb 18, 2008

• #1

I am curious as to what format hard drivesinitially come in. I ask since I have a 250gb external and before i formatted it to hfs for time machine, both windows and osx could read and write to it

my question is how? the only format i thought both os's can read and write to were fat32 and this is limited to a 32gig size

can anyone provide some insight as I want to make it so both mac and pc can access the whole drive

thanks!

 

Eidorian

macrumors Penryn

• Feb 18, 2008

• #2

The Windows XP formatter limits you to volumes up to 32 GB for FAT32. You can format much larger ones to FAT32.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

 

dukebound85

macrumors Core

Original poster

• Feb 18, 2008

• #3

are you able to reformat the whole drive as fat32 in say disk utility?

 

Eidorian

macrumors Penryn

• Feb 18, 2008

• #4

dukebound85 said:

are you able to reformat the whole drive as fat32 in say disk utility?

Click to expand...

Up to 8 TiB in FAT32. I use Disk Utility often to format my larger volumes to FAT32. There are still plenty of drive manufacturers that offer FAT32 formatting utilities for Windows.

 

dukebound85

macrumors Core

Original poster

• Feb 18, 2008

• #5

thanks for your help, much appreciated