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1 External Hard Drive for Your Mac and PC

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You can share one hard drive between your Mac and PC, but it needs to be in the right format.

See chart for the format that best serves your needs.

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1 External Hard Drive for Your Mac and PC

By: Chuck Konfrst
Published: Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Categories: Mastering the Mac, Switching from Windows

So you have a PC, a Mac and an external hard drive you want to all play friendly. Well it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Sure, the USB or Firewire ports are the same on both machines, but the real culprit is file formats.

Windows uses either FAT32 or NTFS. Mac OS X uses Mac OS Extended also known as HFS+. All you really need to know is that they are just three different methods for storing information. Macs can handle some Windows formats, but Windows cannot handle HFS+ without additional software.

To see the format of the external drive, right-click on the icon and select Properties (Windows) or Get Info (Mac)

Mac OS X has been able to read and write FAT32 formatted hard drives since the very beginning. If you have a FAT32 drive you can simply connect it to your Mac and it will very easily be able to read and write to it. There is nothing special you need to do. However, there are two limitations of FAT32. 1.) It only supports file sizes of 4GB or less. 2.) Some Mac applications may not run from the drive as FAT32 does not adequately handle the permissions structure of Mac OS X.

NTFS is a different story. NTFS is a more modern Windows format but is proprietary to Microsoft. Licensing is required to use it which is probably why Apple doesn’t fully support it. Macs can read an NTFS drive, but they cannot write to one. So you have 4 options if you have an NTFS external hard drive:

Option	Pro	Cons
Leave NTFS if you are just using the drive to transfer files from the PC to the Mac.	Easy - Nothing to do.	You will not be able to transfer files from the Mac to the PC.
Reformat your NTFS drive to FAT32. Don’t forget to backup your files first!	Easy Requires no special software Good if you will be sharing the drive equally between the Mac and PC.	You need to reformat the drive. Limited to 4GB files or less. Some Mac applications my not run from the drive (not an issue if you are simply backing up though).
Reformat your drive to HFS+. You will need software such as MacDrive ($50) so that Windows will be able to read/write to the drive.	Good if you think you will primarily use the drive on the Mac and only occasionally on the PC.	Cost Relatively more complicated to install/maintain.
Keep NTFS and install NTFS For Mac 6.0 ($30) so that the Mac will be able to read and write to the drive.	Good if you will be using the drive primarily on the PC.	Cost Relatively more complicated to install/maintain.

How to Format Your External Hard Drive - Mac OS X

Backup any data on the drive - formatting will erase everything.
Open “Disk Utility” (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility)
Click on the External Drive
Click on the “Erase” tab
In “Volume Format” select either Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or MS-DOS (FAT32).
Click “Erase”

Note: This is to format your drive using the default settings. You can further customize the formatting by selecting partitions, security settings, free space and other options. See http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html for a great step-by-step walkthrough.

How to Format Your External Hard Drive - Windows

Backup any data on the drive - formatting will erase everything.
Double-click on “My Computer”
Right-click on the External Drive
Select “Format...”
In “File System” select either FAT32 or NTFS
Click “Start”

Note: This is to format your drive using the default settings. You can further customize the formatting by selecting capacity, allocation size and other options. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313348 for further details.

Do you have any tips to share about using your HD on both a Mac and PC? Let us know or ask questions in the Comments section below!


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Your Comments:

Hi All,

I have a old external drive (external case and my old pc hd - 80gb) which i connected to my macbookpro 10.5, but it does not show up even with disk utility / ethernet lead / usb.

I have ordered a WD 500gb brand new hard drive which i plan to use as one of my backups, but I am worried the same thing will happen.

I am new to this, and any form of productive advice with be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

mathew thomas
01/21/2009 at 11:33 AM

regarding external hard drives, I have the New Macbook Pro OS X 10.5.6 and I want to transfer my HD (PC formatted) to my Macbook. the pop up tells me the Macbook can't read the HD and it needs to be reformatted, but in doing so I'll lose everything on the HD. What do I do from here? I need to back up the external HD, but where and in what format? Once my existing External HD is reformatted, how do I then transfer the 'backup files formatted in PC' back to the reformatted Ex HD on the Macbook? Navigating the Macbook is so smooth yet very confusing. help?

LC

LC
01/27/2009 at 10:15 AM

Matt - Most new HDs come in Fat 32 and are read fine by Macs. Go for it. In the case it doesn't, just reformat it right off the bat.

LC - Transfer your files to another Fat 32 or NTFS drive, reformat your your pc drive and then copy back to the reformatted drive.

Chris Kerins
01/28/2009 at 05:25 PM

Hello!

I have the same problem of reading my external HDD which is NTFS in Mac, but not able to write to it. I have parallels running as well which is windows XP, but i am not able to even detect the external HDD in my parallel windows!!

srinivas
03/06/2009 at 08:22 AM

ok, so i just reformatted my ext. HD to FAT 32 as i use both OS.
i went to my pc ( HD works fine on my mac) and i inserted the usb, i got a noise which recognizes a new device, BUT my HD didn't appear in "my computer".... any help would be appreciated

Amir
05/10/2009 at 12:42 PM

ok guys, i formatted my ext. HDD to MS-DOS i thought it was now in FAT32, but obviously not, it is NTFS and is read-only on my mac, i am unable to format it to FAT32 on my windows XP as there is only a NTFS option, maybe this is because it is not recognized s a device with removable storage?- it thinks it is just a HDD.
I am not able to format it on my mac, either.
Some one please help, please!

NOOB
05/17/2009 at 05:17 AM

Can I share one external hard drive between OS Tiger and windows XP (via bootcamp) on the same machine? what are the possible limitations?
I have MBPro, core 2 Duo processor, running OS Tiger

another question regarding the file size: part of the reason buying an external HDD is to transfer my iTunes library to an external drive to free up some disk space. since there is 4GB limitation for FAT32 format, does that mean that any file bigger than 4GB will not run on iTunes if launched directly from the external HDD?

Armen
05/25/2009 at 10:39 AM

From the article I think I should be able to recover my old windows files from my 1T Free-agent BU to our new Mac.. Cant seem to make it work anyine have directions?

NTFS is a different story. NTFS is a more modern Windows format but is proprietary to Microsoft. Licensing is required to use it which is probably why Apple doesn’t fully support it. Macs can read an NTFS drive, but they cannot write to one. So you have 4 options if you have an NTFS external hard drive:

Richard Clay
07/06/2009 at 01:33 PM

I know this kind of late but for those running OS X 10.4.11 and 10.5.6 and above there is a great free program called NTFS-3G for Mac OS which allows wrting to NTFS drives http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

Laff
07/19/2009 at 07:46 PM

I've just ordered a macbook pro (With 320gb Hard drive) and a seagate freeagent desk (non mac version). I would like to use the hard drive mainly for time machine but the occasional transfer of files to a PC. Would it be possible (Using disk utility) to create 2 partitions, One for only time machine (HFS+) and a partition for transferring files to a PC (Fat32)? For example (On a 500gb External) 400gb HFS+ partition (For time machine) and whatever is left over for PC transfers.

Many thanks in advance for any replies (or sorry if it has already been covered)

Dominic
09/04/2009 at 08:37 AM