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Ramonadm

Q: External Hard Drive

Can I use the same external hard-drive to save to, that I use with my PC, with the Mac? I don't want to erase my hard drive. Or do I need to purchase a new hard drive?

Ramona

MacBook Pro

Posted on Aug 19, 2012 2:01 PM

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Q: External Hard Drive

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  • by Csound1,Helpful

    Csound1 Csound1 Aug 19, 2012 4:21 PM in response to Ramonadm
    Level 9 (50,968 points)
    Desktops
    Aug 19, 2012 4:21 PM in response to Ramonadm

    You can use the same drive, but you will need to erase and reformat it to a file system that OSX and Windows can both use, or buy another drive.

  • by Archieismydog,Helpful

    Archieismydog Archieismydog Aug 19, 2012 4:25 PM in response to Ramonadm
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Aug 19, 2012 4:25 PM in response to Ramonadm

    It depends on how the drive is formatted. There are different file systems used on different hard drives, some which work with Macs, some which work with windows, and some which work with both.

     

    You can check how your external drive is formatted by connecting it, and opening Disk Utility (in the utilities folder). If it is ExFAT or MS-DOS formatted, then it should work with both operating systems. If it is Mac OS X formatted it will only work with Macs.

     

    If you have space on your internal drive to store whatever's on your external drive at the moment, if need be, you can reformat your external drive using whichever file system you desire, using the 'erase' tab in disk utility.