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Mobile Hard Drive - Mac?

Pucas

Pucas

macrumors member
Original poster
For Christmas i got this LaCie mobile hard drive
It's great for backup, and nice when i want to share the movies i make together with my friends at highschool. The only problem is; Windows users can't open it. And it seems pretty weird to me, because it says on the box:
billede1ao8.png

Have any of you had the same problem? Or know how to solve it?

// Lucas
 
Pucas said:
For Christmas i got this LaCie mobile hard drive
It's great for backup, and nice when i want to share the movies i make together with my friends at highschool. The only problem is; Windows users can't open it. And it seems pretty weird to me, because it says on the box:
billede1ao8.png

Have any of you had the same problem? Or know how to solve it?

// Lucas
Click to expand...

Depends on how you've got it formatted - Windows cannot read Mac-formatted drives. The answer is to format it FAT32, which both Windows and Mac can handle.
 
The hardware itself will work with Windows or Mac. Whether it will mount (and whether it is read/write) will depend on the format you chose for the drive.

If it's HFS+ (default Mac format) a Windows PC cannot mount it without additional software
If it's NTFS your Mac cannot write to it without additional software
If it's FAT32 then both can mount and read/write.
 
However if you use FAT32 you wont be able to use it for Time Machine, although considering it's size I would guess you probably don't anyway.

Just remember if you reformat it, it'll delete everything on the disc, so take everything you want off first.
 
Amazing how quick i got an answer!
- How to i reformat it to FAT32 ? 🙂

Btw. Thank you very much for your answers! 🙂
 
And if you do re-format (using Disk Utility in the Utilities folder which is inside Applications) your drive performance will appear to take a big hit. File transfers will take much longer.
 
But isn't it worth it?
I mean.. i also have a PC and also boot camp on my MB..
- Don't you guys think it is worth it?
 
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