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Formatting a External Hard Drive

How do you format a External Hardive to use on a Mac? Any Help would be appreciated. Thanks

G

iMac 20in G5, Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Jan 5, 2006 12:42 PM

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6 replies

Feb 26, 2006 5:58 PM in response to Glenn Cloutier

I am also looking into formatting an external hard drive, but I have several questions:

Is there a size limit to what my mac will recognize? (i am looking to format a 200gig external drive)

When partitioning, can I create the partitions in separate formats (DOS,HFS, etc)?

What formats would be best if I am looking to back up my iBook G4 (with a bootable drive) and to transfer data to a PC?

Any advice would be welcomed. Thank.

ibookG4 Mac OS X (10.4.5) ipod shuffle

Feb 26, 2006 6:03 PM in response to BrianPT

Is there a size limit to what my mac will recognize?


No realistic limit.

What formats would be best if I am looking to back up my iBook G4 (with a bootable drive) and to transfer data to a PC?


A PC won't recognize any of the Mac formats. You will need to format it with one of the Windows options.

Feb 26, 2006 6:20 PM in response to Duane

You might think about investing in MacDrive. It can be installed on your PC so that it can read HFS Journaled format. This is the best option because even though Macs can read DOS there are some funky things that occur. I don't remember exactly what, but I think Dr. Smoke mentions it in one of this links.

However, if you are just looking to do a one time transfer I would first format the drive as DOS, copy all PC files on it, and then bring it back to the Mac copy the files over and then erase and reformat it in HFS.

Formatting a External Hard Drive

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