Formatting a LaCie HD for Mac and PC

[Soire]

I recently purchased a 250 gig external HD from LaCie with triple interface. So it works wonderfully on my iBook, but how can I make it so that a PC will recognize it? I believe that the drives come formatted in HDF(?) or some apple friendly format. So must I format it to FAT32 to make PCs recognize the drive, and how do I do this? Will I lose drive space? How should I format it, with the silverlining software disk?

Any help would be appreciatted.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I recently purchased a 250 gig external HD from LaCie with triple interface. So it works wonderfully on my iBook, but how can I make it so that a PC will recognize it? I believe that the drives come formatted in HDF(?) or some apple friendly format. So must I format it to FAT32 to make PCs recognize the drive, and how do I do this? Will I lose drive space? How should I format it, with the silverlining software disk?

Any help would be appreciatted.

If I were you, I'd see if the Silverlining disk that came with your drive has a formatting utility on it and use that to make the drive FAT32. Unfortunately, the Apple-supplied Disk Utility is very finicky about whether it will let you format a disk for Windows. I've found that it only works if you select the Erase option for the drive, not any volumes it contains; even then, it may not let you do it. Try my suggestions for Disk Utility and see if it will do it for you - otherwise, you'll need a third-party formatting utility.