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Jon12345

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 2, 2011
1
0
Hi Jon new here to the forum. I have a MBP. I also just bought a 3TB G drive. I used to be a PC person, now I mostly use MAC but still have a need to access my files- all 2-3 TB of them- on the PC. I am a professional photographer and I have a couple of TB on G drive externals that are formatted for Macs. I want my new 3TB G Drive to have all the files that are on my G Drive externals formatted for Mac.

At the risk of being redundant, my goal is to use my new 3TB G drive in this way: hook it up to my MBP, format it in FAT32 and transfer all the files from "old" my G drive (which is formatted for Mac) to this new 3TB G Drive. I will then hook up the 3 TB G drive up to my PC as it will have all of the files that are on the Mac-formatted G drive.

The G Drive manual says to go to disk utility on the MPB, go to "erase", and then format it to FAT32. Problem is, when I open disc utility on the MBP, and I go to "erase" I am not given an option to format it in FAT32, which I have been told is what I need that 3TB drive to be so that it can work on both the Mac and PC. The only options I get are a bunch of Mac-OS ones (4 including Mac-OS, Mac -OS extended, case sensitive, etc), and then exFAT. What is this exFAT?

How do I make it to FAT32? My understanding is that FAT32 is the format I will need to do cross-operating system work, not exFAT.
I have done a little bit of research and my concern is that if I format it in exFAT my PC, which operates on Windows XP, won't be able to work with it. Plus who knows, in the future I may be using a different PC operating system and I am worried the exFAT won't work.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks!
Jon
 
How do I make it to FAT32? My understanding is that FAT32 is the format I will need to do cross-operating system work, not exFAT.
I have done a little bit of research and my concern is that if I format it in exFAT my PC, which operates on Windows XP, won't be able to work with it. Plus who knows, in the future I may be using a different PC operating system and I am worried the exFAT won't work.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks!
Jon

Google is your friend:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2801/exfat_versus_fat32_versus_ntfs/

Looks like you can't format a big drive with FAT32. exFAT is introduced with Vista, and there's an add-in to read it with XP SP3.
 
According to this very website, OSX supports exFAT as of 10.6.5

Formatting in FAT32 would be horribly inefficient, as FAT32 supports a maximum of 32GB per partition under Windows XP. There are ways to format using larger partition sizes, but it's still inefficient. exFAT or NTFS are your best bets. There's a non-free NTFS driver for Mac if you use Google.
 
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