help w/ external hard-drive... : (

[iBookG4,4me!]

hey...

just got a iBookG4 for school, and i bought a Maxtor 160GB external hard-drive so that i could back up stuff, and get stuff from my pc, Dell running on Windows XP.
After purchasing i realized that i must format the hard-drive to one or the other, OS X or Windows...
i would like to be abled to put stuff from my pc on the HD, then put it on my Mac,
any help/ info?
i came across MacDrive7 software so that i could read the drive on my PC, but i don't have the 50$ to pay for the software, any free alternatives or advice???

 

[Luigi239]

No, you don't need to buy that.

Open up disc utility (applications>utilities>disk utility) and select the disc. Go to format it, and format it as MS-DOS file system, (which is really FAT32). Both Windows and OS X will then be able to read and write to the drive.

 

[MacBlackBook22]

I formatted my new external hard drive to the Mac journaled I thought that was better for getting it to accept bigger file sizes?

Both my windows and macs are reading and writing to it just fine