Formatting a 1TB external harddrive to FAT32?

[Submeg]

Hello all...

I just bought a new external 1TB Western Digital HD. I am trying to format it to FAT32 so that I can read AND write to it on my Mac. I have another external HD which is 750 GB which is FAT32....How can I format into FAT32?

[woody.cool]

FAT32 is limited to 256GB maximum (although later versions of Windows try to stop you formatting FAT32 partitions bigger than 32GB)

Can MacOS not read/write NTFS partitions? ... I know that quite a few Linux distros can do this nowadays.

[Submeg]

found it on youtube

[Harrison]

Mac OSX natively supports NTFS formatted disks since 10.4.1, so I highly recommend you format it with that and not FAT32. FAT32 is unstable and prone to bad fragmentation, and that is on smaller HDDs, so imagine on a 1TB drive. NTFS was designed from the ground up to be more robust, less likely to fragment, and much more stable.

I don't know if it has been changed since 10.4.1, but OSX couldn't format a disk to NTFS, only use them. So you will need to format the disk in Windows first.

[Submeg]

well I plugged my NTFS formatted drive into my Mac and it said read only?? Will see if I can do any updates...

[Harrison]

I seem to remember the NTFS support isn't enabled fully as standard in OSX and you have to enable it somewhere in the OS settings.

[AndyLandy]

You can download a freeware tool for Windows XP called "Fat32Format" that surpasses the arbitrary 32GB limit that XP's normal format enforces:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...32format.shtml

[Submeg]

I seem to remember the NTFS support isn't enabled fully as standard in OSX and you have to enable it somewhere in the OS settings.

Yea, that's if you update to Snow Leopard. Not wanting to do that atm, works fine for me...I don't need to do that right now...

I've been using FAT32 on my other drive since 2007 and had no problems!

[Vangar]

Maybe create a partition that's around 10gb for transfer between windows/mac, then keep the rest of it NTFS? That's what i usually do and it seems to work fine...

[Submeg]

I can do file transfer fine...it's that I need to be able to edit tags and such on the songs that are there, I also need to be able to edit them in music software programs, so I need to have it stored in that way...if only Mac and Windows could get along in certain aspects...