Can I format external harddrive to fat32 in mac osx?

Discussion in 'Mac Basics and Help' started by bartoszbr, Oct 14, 2008.

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  1. bartoszbr, Oct 14, 2008

    bartoszbr macrumors newbie

    Joined:
    Jun 28, 2008
    #1
    I'll be getting a macbook in a matter of days and I was wondering if I could reformat my WD external hardrive from NTFS to fat32 in leopard osx? The reason why I'm asking is because vista, which I currently use, only allows the format to be done in NTFS and I don't want my external hardrive to be read-only on my macbook.
    or maybe there's a way to read and write in NTFS on macs?
     
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  2. Eidorian, Oct 14, 2008

    Eidorian macrumors Penryn

    Eidorian

    Joined:
    Mar 23, 2005
    Location:
    Indianapolis
    #2
    Disk Utility in OS X can format drives for FAT32. You can in Vista as well but you'll have to use Western Digital's utility to do so.
     
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  3. i.shaun, Oct 14, 2008

    i.shaun macrumors 6502a

    i.shaun

    Joined:
    May 1, 2008
    Location:
    Canada
    #3
    Mactintosh HD>Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility.app


    Connect your External HDD, and open Disk Utility. Select the HDD from the list, and click on the "Erase" section, or the "Partition" section.

    Enter a Volume name, and File System (choose Ms Dos file system). Click "Erase" and let it do it's thing. OS X is usually pretty quick at doing this, so you'll have an HDD that works on both systems, as well as other devices like PS3.

    Alternatively, you can find third party software for the PC to read/write OS X file systems, or third party software for OS X that can read/write NTFS file systems.

    NTFS for mac works, but it is not free.
     
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