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Reformat external hard drive

T

tritchyy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
OK so I have a 500gb seagate external, go to disk utility and erase it, now comes the sad part....Plug it into my PC that I need for school and NOTHING 😕

So, I try erasing it again and making sure it is formatted for MSDOS and still no luck. So I try partitioning and that is also no luck. 1 part for mac, other free space because no windows option was present..I really need this to work and would be REALLY grateful to whoever helps me get this solved! Thank you all so much for understanding I'm new to this forum and all so I hope I posted in the right place as well, once again thank you all for understanding and I hope to hear from you soon. :apple::apple::apple::apple: <3!
 
If you're really trying to get it working in Windows, why not format it in Windows?

  • Right-click Computer -> select Manage...
  • select Disk Management and find your external
  • Partition and format (FAT or NTFS)

Am I missing something?
 
If I am understanding correctly, you want the hard drive to be writeable and readable by both Mac OS X and Windows. Right?

To do that, format the drive in Windows and make sure that the FAT option is the one you are formatting to. This will make it both Mac OS X and Windows compatible.
 
A drive over 40GB that needs to be formatted for both mac and windows needs to be formatted on mac. If you try to do it on a windows machine it will force you to use NTFS, which is not readable by macs.
 
KoolStar said:
A drive over 40GB that needs to be formatted for both mac and windows needs to be formatted on mac. If you try to do it on a windows machine it will force you to use NTFS, which is not readable by macs.
Click to expand...

NTFS is readable on Macs, but not writeable without add-ons.
 
format it as NTFS in windows, and then install ntfs-3g on the mac. You will then have full read/write support on both windows and the mac.
 
thank you all for the replies!

Well the issue is that it won't let me rename it I can view it and its description on windows but lack the ability to rename it. I just want to be able to save the movies and stuff that I have on this and same for my windows machine. :/
 
I have a separate hard drive for time machine, I heard the thing about if its over a certain amount that it needs to be written by the windows one. But my mac will only let me write in MSDOS FAT and that STILL won't show on windows.
 
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