windows friendly hard drive format?

[howard]

I have a portable hard drive that doesn't come up in windows when I plug it in to a windows machine. I'm wondering if I can reformat the drive to work and what format I should use...

Thanks

 

[NYmacAttack]

I have a portable hard drive that doesn't come up in windows when I plug it in to a windows machine. I'm wondering if I can reformat the drive to work and what format I should use...

Thanks

FAT32 will work with both. Or you can find software for windows that will see HFS drives.

 

[howard]

on my disc utility I'm showing mac os extend journeled or no ms-dos and unix... i'm guess the ms-dos will work? and hopefully it will work on my mac as well? I didn't see a fat-32 specific setting...

 

[ender78]

on my disc utility I'm showing mac os extend journeled or no ms-dos and unix... i'm guess the ms-dos will work? and hopefully it will work on my mac as well? I didn't see a fat-32 specific setting...

MS-DOS is FAT32

 

[Mechcozmo]

MS-DOS is FAT32

Actually, the MS-DOS format that Disk Utility creates is FAT-16. You can make FAT-32 drives on Windows or Linux computers, and probably can via the Terminal on the Mac, but I'm too lazy to look it up now. 😀