Mac users can mount and read NTFS formatted Windows drives, making NTFS compatible with the Mac on the reading and mounting front, but writing to an NTFS drive requires using either third party software or enabling NTFS write support on the Mac using an experimental functionality bundled on the Mac. This is less than ideal for most users.
I have a Mac formatted laptop drive (60gig) that I've gotten an external USB casing for (USB 2.0). I know the drive works fine with the mac, but I'd like to format it for the PC (I think then it can be used between the two-am I correct in this?). The problem is, when I plug it into the PC, I don't even SEE it to be able to format it.
The PC does recognize the drive being plugged in (it makes the little sound), and I can remove it using the taskbar icon, but it doesn't show up as a drive in My Computer. I've already checked Tweak UI and made sure the drive letters were turned on. I've also checked that the drivers for the USB mass storage device were up-to-date and working properly. So my questions: 1) If I format this for PC, will I be able to still see the files on the mac? Can I use it to move large amounts of files between the Mac and PC)? 2) How do I get it to show up so that I can format it for the PC? Thanks for all your help!
I work for a school district so I'm always switching between Mac's and PC's. What I did on my external drive was to create two different partitions.
I have one 20GB HFS+(Mac) partition and one 55GB FAT32(PC) partition. I installed OSX to the Mac partition so I can boot to it and use the PC partition for storage. The only bad thing about using FAT32 is that there is a 4GB file size limit, so anything bigger than that has to go on the Mac partition. I did not encounter the 32GB FAT32 limit. I used the how-to below, look for the post by silentaccord as the previous ones did not work.
You have to use the command line as disk utility and windows disk management will not allow you to create two partition types.