How to format HD for Airport Extreme

[netty1]

Hi everyone,

I'm just waiting for my Airport Extreme Base Station. I plan to connect to it a 2 GB HD. I suppose to use it easy with Mac it has to be formated in HFS+ ?. I would like to use it as storage for all devices at home inc. Win7 laptop but also as a Time Machine drive.

My macbook has 320 GB HD and I'm thinking to divide USB HD into 2 partitions 500 MB for Time Machine and 1,5 GB for other use.

Is it a good idea, will it work as I expect?

netty1

 

[Weaselboy]

You are on the right track. Time Machine needs to have HFS+, so in Disk Utility make one partition in Mac OS Extended whatever size you want for the backups. Then make a second partition and format that one in FAT32 (Disk Util shows it as MS-DOS).

You will be able to access the FAT32 partition from both OS X and Windows.

 

[BroadcastDoc]

Even if you format with HFS+, you can still access it in Windows - it appears as a network share.