Johnmalcolm
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: How to partition an external HDD to NTFS and Fat32

Hi guys,

 

I wonder if you can help me.... I'm trying to partition my WD external HDD into two. I want the first partition to be formatted as NTFS as I will be using this part with only windows. The second half I need to be able to use it on both mac and windows and therefore would prefer FAT 32. I have already partitioned the drive into two and formatted the first half to NTFS. The problem occurs when I try to use disk utility to format the free space on the drive to FAT 32. Can you help me?

 

Screen Shot 2014-02-19 at 22.01.59.png

Airport Express

Posted on Feb 19, 2014 2:27 PM

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Johnmalcolm

Q: How to partition an external HDD to NTFS and Fat32

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  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Feb 19, 2014 2:38 PM in response to Johnmalcolm
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Feb 19, 2014 2:38 PM in response to Johnmalcolm

    thats well and fine, but you do realize that :

     

    A: HD are cheap as dirt

     

    B: putting all your data into a single external HD is a nasty choke point for awful data loss?

     

     

    ergo, not a hot idea in general.

     

     

     

     

    Mac's on OS X can't format or write to NTFS formatted drives, they can read from it though.

     

    Your best option is to format the external drive on the Windows machine using exFAT as it will do it correctly, the Mac has issues formatting exFAT for Windows.

     

    Once the drive is formatted exFAT on Windows, it will work like a charm between both platforms and can use +4GB sized files, which FAT32 (MSDOS) cannot.

     

    .Drives, partitions, formatting w/Mac's + PC's

     

    from Dsstore