Formatting Issues

[Alwaystriumph]

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I recently purchased my first Mac. I want to use my external hdd for storage of my media. My hdd was formatted to ntfs. I have since made a backup folder on my Mac desktop and reformatted my external hdd to ms-dos (fat32). I then moved my files back onto the hdd. When I went to iTunes and under prefrences I tried selecting the appropriate folder in my hdd containing my music. Although visible in the finder menu the contents were grayed out. iTunes would not add the music but I was able to click and drag the folder into iTunes. Though this worked it doesn't seem correct. How can I make these files accessible to iTunes without the hassle of drag and drop every single time?

 

[Detrius]

Why did you format it FAT32? Are you going to be regularly moving this drive to a PC? What exactly are you wanting to do? You've really only told us what has failed, but you haven't told us what your goal is.

 

[Alwaystriumph]

Why did you format it FAT32? Are you going to be regularly moving this drive to a PC? What exactly are you wanting to do? You've really only told us what has failed, but you haven't told us what your goal is.

OP here. I am an novice when it comes to doing all this stuff. Let me explain why I did what I did. I chose FAT32 because it was compatible with both Mac and Windows. I just switched over and wanted the flexibility to go back and forth to Mac and PC. Now after thinking about it I probably won't have to do that. So if there is a better format for my external hdd to work on a Mac I'd like to know about it. The reason I was doing this was I wanted to have my media on the external hdd to free up space and not bog down my new Mac. I had my PC running my media off of it and it seemed to work well. I spoke with some folks at the Apple store and they said they do the same on their Macs and recommend it. Does that help?

Thank you for letting me know that I needed to clarify my question.