Hi,

For Christmas I purchased my mom a Western Digital 750GB My Passport Essential SE Hard Drive from Staples.

I was going to mess around with having one partition for PC and one for MAC use however she claims she only uses her MacBook now and would not be doing any file transfer for PC.

Like I expected out of the box it is already formatted in NTFS for Windows. I would like to be able to reformat the drive for Mac use.

What are my options?

I have seen guides on how to partition the drive to FAT32 but have read that only allows at most 32GB partitions. I would like the ENTIRE drive to be Mac Compatible, and if possible just one partition.

I have also read something about HFS+ format for Mac's as well.

Can anyone spell out for me how to do this? Including any software I may need to reformat the drive?

Thanks

mac can read/write NTFS with the ntfs-3g (or whatever the mac name for it is)... but if you really want it a native mac file-system use the "disk utility" app. I think it talks you thru it all

Hi,

For Christmas I purchased my mom a Western Digital 750GB My Passport Essential SE Hard Drive from Staples.

I was going to mess around with having one partition for PC and one for MAC use however she claims she only uses her MacBook now and would not be doing any file transfer for PC.

Like I expected out of the box it is already formatted in NTFS for Windows. I would like to be able to reformat the drive for Mac use.

What are my options?

I have seen guides on how to partition the drive to FAT32 but have read that only allows at most 32GB partitions. I would like the ENTIRE drive to be Mac Compatible, and if possible just one partition.

I have also read something about HFS+ format for Mac's as well.

Can anyone spell out for me how to do this? Including any software I may need to reformat the drive?

ThanksDon't use FAT32 unless you absolutely have to. It sucks and has been replaced by much better filesystems. There's no 32GB partition limit, btw - that's just a Windows limit on what the text-mode setup can format. The actual theoretical limit for a FAT32 partition is 8TB. But you can't have a single file over 4GB, and that really sucks.

If she's only using Mac, then format it with HFS+ and stick with it.

Don't use FAT32 unless you absolutely have to. It sucks and has been replaced by much better filesystems. There's no 32GB partition limit, btw - that's just a Windows limit on what the text-mode setup can format. The actual theoretical limit for a FAT32 partition is 8TB. But you can't have a single file over 4GB, and that really sucks.

If she's only using Mac, then format it with HFS+ and stick with it.
I agree with not using FAT32, however, anyone who has a single file over 4gb would probably not need to ask how to format a hd.

I agree with not using FAT32, however, anyone who has a single file over 4gb would probably not need to ask how to format a hd.

Not really I torrented DVD image = 4.7+ GB in one file

Hi,

For Christmas I purchased my mom a Western Digital 750GB My Passport Essential SE Hard Drive from Staples.

I was going to mess around with having one partition for PC and one for MAC use however she claims she only uses her MacBook now and would not be doing any file transfer for PC.

Like I expected out of the box it is already formatted in NTFS for Windows. I would like to be able to reformat the drive for Mac use.

What are my options?

I have seen guides on how to partition the drive to FAT32 but have read that only allows at most 32GB partitions. I would like the ENTIRE drive to be Mac Compatible, and if possible just one partition.

I have also read something about HFS+ format for Mac's as well.

Can anyone spell out for me how to do this? Including any software I may need to reformat the drive?

Thanks
Go to your Applications folder > Utilities
Open disk utility
Make sure the hard drive is plugged in; you'll see it in the list on the left.
Click on the hard drive (you'll have two options, the actual drive and the partition; click on the drive, it should be the one that's not indented)
Go to the Partition tab
Change the format to whatever you want (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for HFS) and make sure it's only 1 partition
Hit apply, and confirm your choices.

As someone else said, you could also use a driver to make NTFS writeable on Macs, but it's not gonna write nearly as fast as if it was the native format. If the drive's not gonna be used on anything but a Mac, I wouldn't bother with anything but the native HFS format. It'll save a lot of headaches in the end.

Go to your Applications folder > Utilities
Open disk utility
Make sure the hard drive is plugged in; you'll see it in the list on the left.
Click on the hard drive (you'll have two options, the actual drive and the partition; click on the drive, it should be the one that's not indented)
Go to the Partition tab
Change the format to whatever you want (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for HFS) and make sure it's only 1 partition
Hit apply, and confirm your choices.

As someone else said, you could also use a driver to make NTFS writeable on Macs, but it's not gonna write nearly as fast as if it was the native format. If the drive's not gonna be used on anything but a Mac, I wouldn't bother with anything but the native HFS format. It'll save a lot of headaches in the end.


Thanks so much! I'm confident I can follow those directions... now the noob question of the day is:

Can I format it the above way from my PC or would I need to do the formatting from the Mac it will be used on?

thanks

Thanks so much! I'm confident I can follow those directions... now the noob question of the day is:

Can I format it the above way from my PC or would I need to do the formatting from the Mac it will be used on?

thanks
That's the instructions for formatting it on the Mac. You'd need special software on your Windows box to format it as an HFS+ partition.

And just so you know, HFS+ = Mac OS Extended. (Just so there's no confusion)

GParted: http://gparted.org/

Parted Magic: http://partedmagic.com

Either one can be booted off USB or CD and create HFS+ partitions.

Help and Docs are available at both sites.