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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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Moving Files Between a Mac and a PC the Easy Way

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Can I Do Everything on a Mac?

1 External Hard Drive for Your Mac and PC

By: Chuck Konfrst
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:

APEX, you can't install Windows on a PPC Mac. It must be an Intel Mac.

Chris Kerins
10/14/2009 at 01:34 PM

I had a G4 PPC Mac Mini and used virtual PC to install XP. However it was really sluggish. Take this into consideration. If you want to use XP a lot, maybe consider upgrading your machine to an intel one.

Dom
10/14/2009 at 02:21 PM

Thanks for this wonderful info Chuck! I followed the 2nd option above and now I got my external HD working again on both MAC and PC! Thanks again!

Chris
11/02/2009 at 04:03 PM

i do recommend macdrive, since i uses bootcamp to access the same music and video files to access both on OSX and XP, its so space saving. but is there any other way to do this? more simpler ways? because my ext HD has been filled with so many data.. can't imagine to backup to another drive and doing the format to put it back in

ndree
11/21/2009 at 11:07 AM

I have a PC and backed it up to my Seagate external hard drive. I also have a mac and wanted to back this up too. I used option 2 : 'Reformat your NTFS drive to FAT32'. It seemed that I successfully backed up the mac to the hard drive, and now there should be all of the data on their from both mac and PC. HOWEVER...
My PC no longer recognises the hard drive - it doesn't appear in 'my computer', but it is in 'devise manager'. What can I do???!!!

charlotte
12/05/2009 at 04:07 PM

I recently moved two external drives from a PC that died to a Mac running OS 10.5. When I try to reformat to Mac OS Extended, the drive gets erased but I get an error message saying that the formatting was unsuccessful. I am able to reformat them to DOS on the Mac, but I need the drives to be formatted in Mac OS extended. Do you have any idea what the problem might be and what I should do?

Joel Pickford
12/16/2009 at 11:29 AM

In my opinion, MAC isn't popular than PC so I installed NTFS FOR MAC 6.0 on my Mac. I transfer all data HFS+ -> NTFS on external HDD then using it on other normal computers.

HOHO
01/03/2010 at 05:39 AM

I was able to use Disk Utility in OS X 10.5 to partition my external drive. Here I made one partition the OSX journaled format and left the other partition as free space. Once that was complete I took my drive to Windows 7, used Disk Management. There I selected the free space on the drive and was able to format it in NTFS. Now I can use both time machine and windows backup on one hard drive.

Tyler
01/06/2010 at 11:24 AM

Hey! My external hard drive (Western Digital Passport) was previously working perfectly for my Macbook Pro, but, recently, I cannot access my files from the external HD. Moreover, my laptop notifies me of a power shortage when I connect the HD to the USB port. After the notification, my laptop shuts down. What should I do? Can I still access the files in the HD? Thanks!

James
01/09/2010 at 06:21 AM

Gladstone,
goodday, my question is that i use a mac at school to do my music, but i have a pc at home and i would like to transfer the files from mac to my pc. what hard drive is best to buy.

gladstone malcolm
01/30/2010 at 08:41 PM