I've just bought an 8TB external drive for housing my family's communal collection of video files. I use a mac but other family members use a PC and the drive needs to be accessible to everyone. In the past we always formatted our hard drives as FAT32 so that the whole family could use them. However when I tried to format this new drive in disk utility the process failed. Any ideas?
How do I format an 8GB external drive to FAT32?
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Spawn_Dooley
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Hello - I have more or less the same question.
I have a WD Passport external 2TB HDD which the Mac asked me if I wanted to use as a Time Machine and I said yes, and it seems to be backing things up in the background.
I am quite new to this iMac (2010, running El Capitan) and now have a second 2Tb WD Passport external HDD. I've used a Windows PC for years (now on Win 10) and I want to use this Passport as a sort of portable drive for my photographs and family history stuff. So need to format it so it can be read and written to by both Windows and Mac.
I've googled and found I need to format it first as FAT32, but this advice dates back to 2010-2012. Is the advice still the same? Should I still format it to FAT32 or have things changed since then?
Your advice would be much appreciated
I have a WD Passport external 2TB HDD which the Mac asked me if I wanted to use as a Time Machine and I said yes, and it seems to be backing things up in the background.
I am quite new to this iMac (2010, running El Capitan) and now have a second 2Tb WD Passport external HDD. I've used a Windows PC for years (now on Win 10) and I want to use this Passport as a sort of portable drive for my photographs and family history stuff. So need to format it so it can be read and written to by both Windows and Mac.
I've googled and found I need to format it first as FAT32, but this advice dates back to 2010-2012. Is the advice still the same? Should I still format it to FAT32 or have things changed since then?
Your advice would be much appreciated
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Apple's disk utility is in some ways helpful and in others completely useless.
I've experienced that formatting a drive (flash or hdd) to FAT32 or ExFAT on a Mac doesn't work properly or not at all.
Options are provided to make those drives usable on Mac and PC, but often it works just on either one and not the other.
I usually go the route to create 2 partitions on a external HDD, format one for Mac in disk utilities and then switch to Windows (Parallels) and format the other partition there. Both partitions will be recognized on a Mac, but only the Mac partition will be accessible on Macs. you can't drag and drop items to the Fat32 partition.
For me it has been the better solution, rather than going with ExFat to make it work on both systems.
I've experienced that formatting a drive (flash or hdd) to FAT32 or ExFAT on a Mac doesn't work properly or not at all.
Options are provided to make those drives usable on Mac and PC, but often it works just on either one and not the other.
I usually go the route to create 2 partitions on a external HDD, format one for Mac in disk utilities and then switch to Windows (Parallels) and format the other partition there. Both partitions will be recognized on a Mac, but only the Mac partition will be accessible on Macs. you can't drag and drop items to the Fat32 partition.
For me it has been the better solution, rather than going with ExFat to make it work on both systems.