Formatting an external hard drive

[Spiezels]

Hello there.

Just purchased a 500 gig EHD and need to use it on my mac and pc to transfer files, save work, music, films etc.

Atm it won't transfer anything while it's in the mac I assume because it's formatted to pc.

I assume I need to change it to FAT32 or something.

What do I do thankyou please.

 

[Damo_Sport]

go into my computer, right click the drive and im sure format selection is there? :S

 

[Spiezels]

This on pc not mac right.

 

[Tom]

Disk Utility, Erase.

 

[Spiezels]

Sound ta lads.

 

[Spiezels]

I can see the format bit but will doing this make it usable on mac... i dont understand?

 

[Tom]

Whats not to understand? Format it in FAT32.

 

[Spiezels]

On the format tab it doesnt say anything about FAT32 there's drop down boxes for Capacity, FIle System (NTFS). Only the one with Allocation unit size can be changed and it does say FAT32 anywhere... or will formatting it automatically make it FAT32.

And do i need to check quick format and enable compression?

 

[Tom]

Plug in your external drive. Keep in mind that by formatting your drive you will lose all your information.

Open Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities), select your external drive, and click the "Erase" tab.

Under "Volume Format" choose MS-DOS (FAT), which is FAT 32, and click Erase.

Press Erase again to confirm and let it do its thing.

 

[Spiezels]

Done, cheers Tom.

 

[MonkeyKnifeFight]

If you format the drive on the PC you may have trouble when it comes to using it on the Mac, we see it all the time where the drive is read only when mounted to the Mac. To combat this you need to format the drive in fat32 on the Mac.

The only obvious limitation to fat32 is you cant have a single file size greater than 4gb, this is only likely to present itself as a problem if you are doing hd video editing.

Right back to work :sleepy:

 

[Spiezels]

Whats the best thing to do then instead of FAT32 as i do edit in 1080i HD.

Seems fine atm though as i can just split the HD clips if they are too large.