I recently purchased an external hard drive
SAMSUNG (Model No NM-0802)
when i plug the USB cable it will not display on the desktop of my mac
I operate on MacBook Pro and Mac OS X Lion
On the other hand, It is detected in the Disk Utilities pane and is currently set as NTFS format
how do i reformat it to work both in PC and Mac?
thx in advance
MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.2)
In Finder > Preferences enable External Disks under the General and Sidebar tabs.
To 'see' the USB disk on a PC and Mac use Disk Utility to format is as either MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT.
You have to format it FAT32 or exFAT. With FAT32 you can only have files of 4GBs or less with exFAT the size of the files that can stored on the drive is much greater, not sure if there is a limit to the size.
You should format it on a Win PC to either one of those formats.
Use Disk Utility to erase and format as FAT. exFAT can handle larger files, but you need a PC to format the drive for use on both MAC's & PC's.
"but you need a PC to format the drive for use on both MAC's & PC's."
I do not agree here. My Windows 7 laptop and an XP tower system both access and write data on several USB disks formatted as exFAT on my iMac (Lion 10.7.3).
Chamar wrote:
"but you need a PC to format the drive for use on both MAC's & PC's."
I do not agree here. My Windows 7 laptop and an XP tower system both access and write data on several USB disks formatted as exFAT on my iMac (Lion 10.7.3).
Well you are one of the lucky ones. Every time I format a drive on Mac exFAT no Windows PC can read it and the first reaction of the PC it to say Drive not formatted.
My experience exactly.
Shootist007 wrote:
You should format it on a Win PC to either one of those formats.
I may be wrong, but, regarding exFAT, my advice is NOT to format it on Win. My understanding is that the Mac OS X exFAT filesystem implementation is not compatible with Win's default cluster size for exFAT. Consequently, if you format it on Win, unless you change the cluster size, you may not be able to use it on Mac. But if you format it on Mac OS X, you should be able to use it on both.
I have a completely different experience, and it seem wjosten has also.
I have never had any problems with a drive formatted FAT32 or exFAT on a Win PC when connected to a Mac.
I have never had a Windows PC read a drive formatted exFAT on a Mac.
MS created exFAT, not Apple. Wouldn't you think a MS OS knows how to format a drive correctly using that format, I do. It is Apple Mac that is not doing it correctly.
Read here & do a Google search. You'll find many entries from users who used a Mac to format exFAT only to find the drive not readable on a Windows PC:
Doesn't make much sense to me to take a chance & use a Mac to do this when you know using a PC will work.
Shootist007 wrote:
I have never had any problems with a drive formatted FAT32 or exFAT on a Win PC when connected to a Mac.
Would you please comment on these two links
<http://krishaamer.com/2011/07/10/exfat-mac-pc-compatible-disk/>
<https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2767345?start=0&tstart=0>
(The second one is referred to in the first item.)
Wouldn't you think a MS OS knows how to format a drive correctly using that format, I do. It is Apple Mac that is not doing it correctly.
Kindly note that the word "correctly" does not appear in my post. I'm not quite sure how the statement,
"the Mac OS X exFAT filesystem implementation is not compatible with Win's default cluster size for exFAT"
can be interpreted to suggest that any OS is not "doing it correctly".
how do I change NTFS settings for my external hard drive in Mac and PC
