Getting a External Hd tomorrow, need help formatting...

[NStocks]

I will be receiving my Iomega prestige 500GB external Hard Drive tomorrow. I have just looked at Iomega website and it says the drives default format is NTFS. How do I format it to HFS + I believe its called, and with this format what are my limitations as to reading and writing from a pc as well.

Thank You

NStocks

 

[JediMeister]

Formatting of a hard drive will be accomplished through use of the Disk Utility application. It is located in Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities. After you launch it and it gathers disk information, you'll be left at a screen where it says "Select a disk, volume, or image." Find the external drive listed on the list on the left, select it, then go to the Erase tab. HFS+ is also known as Mac OS Extended. Select the volume format and switch it to Mac OS Extended if its not already there, Journaled is preferable. Hit erase and let it run. Windows computers cannot read/write to drives of this format without using MacDrive or similar software.

 

[NStocks]

Ok, I have got the hard drive, and it's formatted to Mac OS extended ( HFS + ), with all my data from my mac. Now I'm on my old vista pc because I have send the Mac away for replacement, and the hard drive will not show up. Is there anything that I can install on the Pc so that I can read and write files, or should this have being done on the Mac... I was in a rush copying fils and erasing as much data as possible because the courrier was about to turn up so I didn't have time to install anything, just to format the drive.

I have heard about MacFuse, but not sure where this would need installing.

Thanks

NStocks

 

[JediMeister]

MacFuse is software for allowing a Mac to read/write to NTFS formatted drives. The application you'll want to install on your Windows computer to access HFS+ drives is MacDrive

 

[NStocks]

Great, works perfectly. Thanks

NStocks