How can I partition my portable hard drive to save files both from my MAC and from an old PC?

portable hard drive partition mac image

mr blonde7

I just want to save a ton of files from my MAC to my portable hard drive and if possible, also save files from my PC. I was told the hard drive can be 'partitioned' but have no idea how. I'm fairly clueless regarding all things tech so please use keep it simple LOL.

Answer
You have two options.

1) You can format the drive to FAT32 (MS-DOS in OSX) to make it both PC and Mac compatible. This will allow it to be used on both types of system without partitioning. This is the best option, except that this format won't allow file transfers of single files larger than 4GB in size.

2) You can follow the link below to learn how to use Disk Utility to partition your drive, created two partitions on the one drive, format one for Windows(NTFS) and one for OSX(Max OS Journaled). This will give you storage space for both Operating Systems, but you wouldn't be able to copy items between the systems. By default, OSX cannot read and write a NTFS drive, and Windows cannot read and write to a Mac OS Journaled drive.

http://macs.about.com/od/applications/ss/diskutilitypart.htm

How to retrieve files on a WD external hard drive with a mac.?

Brandon

I used a portable hard drive to back up some files from a PC. Now I need to retrieve those files using a mac. when I try to open the hard drive it tells me that it is not readable. How can I make this thing work so that I can get my files.

Answer
Answer for Windows 7 and OS 10.6.8:

The drive volume has errors. Windows doesn't care much about errors. OS X does, so it won't mount. Repair it on the Windows system like this....
-- Right-click the drive volume in "Computer".
-- Choose "Properties".
-- Choose "Tools".
-- At "Error checking", click the "Check Now" button.
-- Put a check mark (tick) for "Automatically fix file system errors".
-- Put a check mark (tick) for "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors".
-- Click the "Start" button.
-- Click to unmount.
-- Wait.

To do this in OS X....
-- Download and install either NTFS-3G or SL-NTFS (latter for OS 10.6.7 or later 64--bit).
-- Restart.
-- Connect the drive. At the alert message, click "Ignore".
-- Open Disk Utility.
-- Select the external volume ("Volume" is the partition name, probably faded appearance).
-- Select the "First Aid" tab.
-- Click the "Repair Disk" button.
-- Wait.

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