Formatting external drive

[NikonNick]

Hi,

I've just bought a Mac Mini a few days ago after finally making the switch from windows & so I'm still very much feeling my way around the Mac world.

I have a Samsung 500gb usb powered external drive that I usually have attached to a Western Digital TV Live unit which is connected to my TV by HDMI which worked fine when I was using it on my PC to copy files to.

On connecting it to my new Mac and found i couldnt save files to that drive and figured that I needed to format it somehow so I could copy .avi files to it on the mac and that the WD TV can then read them.

I've tried a couple of formatting options using the disk utility on the MAC and can now copy files to it but the WD TV won't register the newly formatted drive when i connect it via the USB.

Sorry for such a newbie query & any incorrect terminology but I'd be real grateful for any suggestions that might help.

Cheers

Nick

 

[blevins321]

Theory

For the part about the Mac not writing, it's probably because the drive was NTFS formatted by Windows. Macs can natively read NTFS, but not write. See this forum posting for details:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1085394/

The Live (via Google) doesn't support the exFAT option that's mentioned there, so my recommendation would be to either install NTFS-3G on your Mac to enable NTFS writing OR format the drive as HFS+, which would cause you to lose Windows compatibility.