NTFS Drive reformat?

[greganpace]

I have a NTFS external drive and it has around 100gb of music and video so I don't have to store it all on my macbook. I have a trial of the Tuxera, but in 15 days I will have to pay for it, which I don't want to do, but this is the only driver I can find that will work with Lion. I am wondering if it is possible to move everything to a PC computer (I don't have another Mac and not quite enough room on this one), reformat the drive for my Mac, then move it all back to the drive. I don't know enough about windows to know if it is capable of moving the information back to the mac formatted drive. I really don't have access to another hard drive or mac to do all this, so I hope this will work.

 

[orvn]

The NTFS-3G Tuxera that I use to read/write to NTFS drives has never asked me for a trail/license.. strange.

Anyways, you can format your drive to HFS (or HFS+) with a Windows machine by booting a LiveCD or LiveUSB or GPartEd (Gnome Partition Editor), which is a Linux driven partition editor that runs right from a bootable CD.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You could also use exFAT.

FAT32 (File Allocation Table)

• Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
• Maximum file size: 4GB.
• Maximum volume size: 2TB

NTFS (Windows NT File System)

• Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
• Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
  [*]To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X: Install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free)
  
• Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx 33USD).
• Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard, but is not advisable, due to instability.
• AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support NTFS
• Maximum file size: 16 TB
• Maximum volume size: 256TB

HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended)

• Read/Write HFS+ from native Mac OS X
• Required for Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner backups of Mac internal hard drive.
• To Read/Write HFS+ from Windows, Install MacDrive
• To Read HFS+ (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer
• Maximum file size: 8EiB
• Maximum volume size: 8EiB

exFAT (FAT64)

• Supported in Mac OS X only in 10.6.5 or later.
• Not all Windows versions support exFAT. See disadvantages.
• exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
• AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support exFAT
• Maximum file size: 16 EiB
• Maximum volume size: 64 ZiB