External FW drive not mounting

[chipchen]

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.

 

[keithcobbett]

I would. Format it on your PC with FAT32 partitioning and this should relieve your issues. Are you currently formatting NTFS???

 

[sparkleytone]

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.

 

[GeeYouEye]

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.

 

[chipchen]

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?