First time External HD owner, needs help.

[xkRoWx]

I just bought a pre-installed external hard drive from a local computer store, it is a WD Caviar 500GB hard disk mounted on a HD enclosure. I plugged the external hard drive to my MBP and an orange USB icon named "New Volume" appeared.

What should I do now? How do I make the hard drive universally accessible to both Windows and OSX?

 

[McGiord]

Format it with FAT32 so both systems can recognize it without any additional software, the caveat is that it can not handle file sizes over 4 Gb.
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GM Colmotores

 

[xkRoWx]

How do I do that?

 

[bobbleheadbob]

How do I do that?

Use the Disk Utility app in your Utilities folder.

 

[xkRoWx]

It allows me to format into any one of these formats:

Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Mac OS Extended
Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive, Journaled)
Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive)
MS-DOS File System
UNIX File System
Free Space

Exactly which one of the above is FAT32?

By the way, from the Disk Utility, there's 5 tabs, First Aid, Erase, Partition, RAID and Restore. Which one is format?

 

[bobbleheadbob]

I think you want to choose the Erase tab, and then format the volume for MS-DOS (FAT).

 

[McGiord]

Ms-dos = Fat32
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Land Rover 101 Forward Control

 

[xkRoWx]

Thanks a lot! It works perfectly fine now