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Formatting Lacie d2 Hard Drive to FAT32?

G

g.kaufman

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 27, 2004
3
0
Hello,

I have recently purchased a Lacie d2 160Gb External Hard Drive and want to use it for Mac and PC under Windows XP. When using the Windows 'Administrative Tools' wizard to format the drive to FAT32 it only shows the drop-down tab for formatting to NTFS. How do I get XP to allow me to format the drive to FAT32 for Mac and XP compatibility?

Help.

Gavin
 
I'm pretty sure that OS X recognises NTFS as well as FAT32, so you would be OK formatting it as NTFS...otherwise why not just use Disk Utility on your Mac to format as MS-DOS (I presume it means FAT32)?
 
g.kaufman said:
Hello,

I have recently purchased a Lacie d2 160Gb External Hard Drive and want to use it for Mac and PC under Windows XP. When using the Windows 'Administrative Tools' wizard to format the drive to FAT32 it only shows the drop-down tab for formatting to NTFS. How do I get XP to allow me to format the drive to FAT32 for Mac and XP compatibility?

Help.

Gavin
Click to expand...

Can't you just partition the drive in Disk Utility and then format one partition for Mac OS X (HFS+ Journaled), and the other for FAT32 or NTFS and use that partition for Windows stuff. Then also your stuff will be more organized.

Just an idea!
 
kewp04 said:
here is a link that instructs how to format external hard drives.
http://www.macpower.com.tw/resources/formatting
hope it helps.

btw im pretty sure mac os only recognizes FAT32 not NTFS
Click to expand...

--------------------

I agree with homeboy above. And the link is one of the best how-tos I've seen regarding this. But, one thing regarding NTFS. You can format using NTFS and VIEW the content on the drive... but no editing would be allowed because of Windows priveleges applied to the format.

I keep an old Win98 machine around just for this purpose. Makes life so much easier to just plug it in and format... than shut it off and throw it back in closet.
 
Formatting for FAT32

Hello!

Thanks for all the tips. Was hoping someone might be able to run me through formatting for FAT32 in MS-DOS on a PC (Windows XP). Also, can it be done on a PC with Windows 98 using an older version of USB? The drive I want to format is a Lacie d2 160Gb external Hard-drive.

Cheers,

Gavin Kaufman :cool:
 
mklos said:
Can't you just partition the drive in Disk Utility and then format one partition for Mac OS X (HFS+ Journaled), and the other for FAT32 or NTFS and use that partition for Windows stuff. Then also your stuff will be more organized.

Just an idea!
Click to expand...

Im not sure both platforms use the same type of partitioning table. I asked this a while back and never did get a solid answer.
 
Windows XP won't format drives over 32gigs in FAT32. Its a limit imposed by microsoft. The drive can be over 32gig, in fact FAT32 supports something like 8terabytes. You are going to need to boot to DOS and use fdisk/format to get the drive up and running.
 
I have a 250gb Maxtor One Touch with Firewire & USB2.

I went through the same loop and basically you can't format the drive to a format that both Windows and MAC can understand other than fat but this has a 2GB limit.

My solution ( and this works fine ) is to format the drive from your mac as a proper MAC formated drive in what ever your chosen format is then install something like macdrive on your windows PC.

This application means your PC will see/access/Write like it's native.

You could also burn the application to CD so should you want to plug the drive into a different PC you can just simply install it.

This works fine for me but may not be relevent in your situation

Simon
 
Celeron said:
Windows XP won't format drives over 32gigs in FAT32. Its a limit imposed by microsoft. The drive can be over 32gig, in fact FAT32 supports something like 8terabytes. You are going to need to boot to DOS and use fdisk/format to get the drive up and running.
Click to expand...

Yes you can, just not through the GUI.

Right-click My Computer and click Manage. Create a partition on the disk, but do not format it. Say during the creation of the partition, you give it the letter of E: so now you click Start, then Run, and type cmd.

Now type:

format /FS:FAT32 E:

If you want a quick format:

format /FS:FAT32 /Q E:

Just did this on a 200GB Maxtor we have here with no problems.
 
MacDrive

Hello,

Does MacDrive work properly under Windows XP? Tried to use it and the Hard-drive wasn't recognised.

Gavin Kaufman
 
I formatted an 80GB Maxtor FW drive to FAT32 for this reason recently. I performed the format on a PC (using Maxtor config utility). I had to create three partions (<32GB) to utilize the whole disk but this could have been becuase of limitations with the Maxtor utility.

It has worked fine so far except for one issue I noticed. I was using the drive for creating a few iMovie documents and noticed that although I could import the DV footage I found that any iMovie edits I made from the FAT32 drive didn't save when I closed and re-opened the document, they saved just fine when moved to Mac formatted drive). Is this because FAT32 doesn't support the resource fork? Other documents (Excel etc.) saved and re-opened properly.

My 2 cents.

Frank
 
Formatting Lacie external hard drive from Windows to Mac

I am new to using Macs.

I have read the posts to this thread and followed the link to the MacPower "how to" page for formatting disks.

The slight difference with my situation is that the the hard drive was originally connected to and formatted as a windows xp device. I need it to work on an eMac PowerPC G4 running OS X 10.3.

I have tried using Disk utility to re-partician the drive (it was the only option that I could run) but it hangs soon after starting. I used the originally selected format of Mac OS Extended (Journal). I'm not sure what the difference is between "Journal" and not journaled.

I left the box ticked for installing Mac OS 9 disk drivers.

If anyone can help, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

QES
 
HOLD ON!

Some things you should Know:

FAT32 SUCKS BUTT!! If a program crashes with something open from the drive, it's likely to corrupt it. If the OS crashes, it's likely to corrupt it. If you unplug it while it's running, it's likely to corrupt it.

Also FAT32 in windows 2000 only supports drives up to 32GB in size

I would NOT recommend FAT32. That being said, NTFS is worthless too:

NTFS is READ ONLY on OS X.

What I'd recommend doing is to get PC Mac drive (or a cheap equivalent) and put it on a small FAT32 partition on your drive and the rest be HFS+ (J), so whenever you hook up to a PC, you can just install it and be ready to go.
 
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