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New external HDD for use with xp and os x

M

mac17

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 18, 2006
221
0
I bought a WD Mybook 250gb external hard drive and i want to use it for both windows and mac (mostly os x) is there a way i can do this in disk utility without making partitions?:confused: I want to be able to read and write on both OS' also i want to use firewire for my MB and usb for my windows machine. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.:) :apple:
 
You just have to reformat it in Disk Utility to FAT32. To do this you select the MS-DOS option when reformating.
 
thanks, i read somewhere that, that format (Fat32) is not so reliable with a big hard drives is that true??
 
I believe WD externals come with FAT32 formatting, so I don't think you will have to do anything. However, you won't be able to have any file larger than 4GB in size, which is usually not a big deal for anything other than video files.

Oh, another drawback: whatever you save on that disk will have write permissions for everybody.
 
hmm i do have an imovie file or two that are almost 18 gb imovie editing takes alot of space is there any other possible way i can do this?Also what do you mean when you say writing permissions is a drawback?
 
ok so i made a partition so i can transfer large files using journeld format and another using fat32, but why does it only recognize it when the usb is plugged in and not firewire?


ps: never mind its working now thanks for the help.
 
but doesn't fat32 not store files bigger than ~4gb? Maybe you can partition the drive, say like have half of it partitioned to ntfs and the other half to hfs.
 
showtime said:
but doesn't fat32 not store files bigger than ~4gb? Maybe you can partition the drive, say like have half of it partitioned to ntfs and the other half to hfs.
Click to expand...

i partitioned it to 50 gb journeld for large files and 200gb fat32 for everything else, should be good no?
 
I haven't personally used it, but I've heard good things about MacDrive. You install it on your Windows computer(s) and they become able to read Journaled formated HDs. Maybe you should give it a try:apple:
 
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