Please please help - external hardrive

squizza

squizza

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Hi guys

I really need help with my external hardrive. To start, I have taken everything off of my external hardrive and it is sitting on my desktop.

I would appreciate a simple, step by step guide to formatting completely my external hardrive and then setting it up so that I can use it both on my macbook AND on a PC on Windows Vista.

I tried before but obviously done it wrong.

Please help me!

Thanks in advance

Sarah
 
You will need to format the hard disk as fat32. There are limits to the size of fat32 partion can be, can you let us know the capacity of the external hard disk please.

Tim
 
xendistar said:
You will need to format the hard disk as fat32. There are limits to the size of fat32 partion can be, can you let us know the capacity of the external hard disk please.

Tim
Click to expand...

Fat32 - It means nothing to me - sorry :(
:help::crying:
 
Thankyou, but it doesn't give me a step by step guide unless I've missed it?

:(
 
Right, so there are 3 common formats - FAT32, NTFS and HFS.

FAT32 - Universal for PC's/Macs
NTFS - licensed by Microsoft (the bad guys)
HFS - Apple's own format (the good guys) ;)

Your mac can read off an NTFS drive but not write to it, so no use to you.
Your PC cannot do anything worthwhile with a HFS+ formatted drive, so that's no use either.

Which leaves us with FAT32
 
On your Mac, plug the drive into its USB port.

Open Disk Utility
Choose your external drive from the panel on the left
Choose "Erase" from the tabs on top
In the middle of the box, hit the dropdown arrow next to "Format"
Choose MS-DOS(FAT)
Hit the "Erase" button at the bottom

Bob's your mother's brother, as they say!

P.S. Don't forget to BACK UP EVERYTHING twice over before you do this.
 
On your Mac you need to go to Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility

You should then see your internal hard drive, your DVD drive and your external hard drive on the panel on the left, make sure you select your external hard drive, it should be called seagate.

Now in the right panel you should have First Aid/Erase/Partition/RAID/Restore, you need to select Partition, then from the drop down choose "1 Partition", then under volume information, give it a name, choose Format: MS-DOS (FAT) then give it the maximum size and click apply.

Hope that helps.
 
Argh, all that typing and beaten to it :puke:
 
If you do not know how to do this, I would advise that you get someone to show you. But anyway:

On Mac go:

Finder - Applications - Utilities - Disk Utility - STOP AND THINK

You need to select your external drive. If you mess up at this stage you may not need to worry about getting more external space, you could have planty of internal.

Select the external drive and add name and format FAT32.

Best of luck - if we don't see you on the forum for a while we'll know that something went wrong.

Chris
 
All went successfully and now works on both pc and mac, and all content is viewable on both :D

Thanks guys!
 
Opps, forgot all about this post, but at least others have sorted you out.

Tim
 
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