thanks, Antoni
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Seagate Agent GoFlex 1.5TB
Easy - back up your data first.
There is no way to change the format of the disk from one to the other without destroying the data on that partition. Backing up the data means you can restore your data after the reformat.
Camelot,
thanks for your help.
I am finding plenty of apps that seem to be doing exactly that, but they're all only running under Windows (i.e. Aomei NTFS to FAT32 Converter 2.0). Unless I am not getting it right, or is it only not possible to be done on a mac os machine?
Since I got this 1.5TB drive it was filling up very fast and now I only have 500GB still unused on it, whereas my Mac Pro itself has a 200GB drive only. Hence that's not really an easy option for me.
Even formatted to FAT32, you're still limited by the fact that FAT32 cannot support files that are larger than 4GB. NTFS can and so can HFS+. Unfortunately, the Mac does not write to NTFS natively unless it's a shared drive on a Windows PC. There is software that allows the Mac to write NTFS though. Here's one. It's paid software:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26288/ntfs-for-mac-os-x
I've seen this on a few Macs, but I've never tried it since I don't have a need to write NTFS from a Mac.
KTGHowie wrote:
Even formatted to FAT32, you're still limited by the fact that FAT32 cannot support files that are larger than 4GB.
But exFAT can.
Right. The only reason why I didn't suggest that is because it doesn't always work right with all Windows PCs. The optimal solution is to just get another hard drive.
I don't have a lot of variations in my Windows boxes, so I've only used it on Vista and 7. It's supposed to be supported on XP SP3 and later.
How to convert NTFS external hard drive to FAT32 without loosing data?
