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External FW drive not mounting

C

chipchen

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
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.
 
I would. Format it on your PC with FAT32 partitioning and this should relieve your issues. Are you currently formatting NTFS???
 
it wont read ntfs. in fact, if you are ever going to use anything other than windows, ntfs is nothing but a pain in the rear. just format it fat32. that would make it much easier all around. also, make it all one partition as OS X doesn't usually find any partitions beyond the first one.
 
Yeah, do FAT32. And if it doesn't mount immediately after that, give it a minute... sometimes OS X will run diskutil on it without telling you.
 
is there anyway to get it to read NTFS at all though? I need to get data off it first.. then reformat. any ideas? utilities?
 
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