best external hard drives mac image
Allie
I bought a Fantom 1TB external hard drive that someone had formatted for a Mac. I have Windows XP and am trying to reformat the drive. The drive does not show up under My Computer. I pull up the disk management window and try to select the drive. All it will let me do is view the properties, but it won't let me select format drive. Any suggestions?
Answer
Connect your Fantom 1TB external hard drive and depending on what version of Windows you are currently using (mine is Windows 7), right click on your Computer icon on your Desktop and click on Manage. Then select Storage then Disk Management. You should be able to see all the drives including the Fantom 1TB external drive. It will probably be labeled as unknown. Right click on it and you should be able to see Delete Volume. Click that and you will get a warning that all data will be erased. Acknowledge OK and the volume will be deleted. Once done, do the same but this time you should see Create Volume and after that, just format.
Good luck and I hope this helps.
Connect your Fantom 1TB external hard drive and depending on what version of Windows you are currently using (mine is Windows 7), right click on your Computer icon on your Desktop and click on Manage. Then select Storage then Disk Management. You should be able to see all the drives including the Fantom 1TB external drive. It will probably be labeled as unknown. Right click on it and you should be able to see Delete Volume. Click that and you will get a warning that all data will be erased. Acknowledge OK and the volume will be deleted. Once done, do the same but this time you should see Create Volume and after that, just format.
Good luck and I hope this helps.
How to make external hard drive writeable to mac and PC?
Jake
I need to make my external hard drive writeable from my mac and my PC. How can i do this so i can use it fully on both??
Answer
@brisray:
Stand back. I'm going to shoot a few holes in your -- answer.
-- "Macs can natively read but not write to NTFS volumes.
Windows cannot read from or write to drives formatted in Macs."
Should be "Windows cannot natively mount drive volumes formatted Mac OS Extended." With HFSExplorer, free, Windows can mount a Mac volume and read files from it... but not write to it. With MacDrive or TransMac, Windows can mount and read-write Mac volumes.
-- "Macs can read and write NTFS volumes using MacFuse"
Not true MacFuse only allows using third-party drivers (technically, it allows creating a file system without root). Without the third-party driver, MacFuse does nothing.
-- "Windows (XP and above) and Macs (Snow Leopard and above) can read and write to exfat drives."
Not exactly. exFAT works with Windows 7 SP1 and above, plus Mac OS 10.6.4 and above.
Now for the real correct answer....
-- DO NOT USE ANY FAT FORMAT FOR ANY LARGE DRIVE VOLUME. That applies to both FAT32 and exFAT. Remember how XP would chop a drive into 32 GB partitions to use FAT32? That was because Microsoft knew how lousy and inefficient FAT is with large volumes due to cluster size increasing with volume size.
-- REAL ANSWER: Either 1. use NTFS with write enabled in OS X, or 2. use two partitions.
Advantage of 1: Files can be added to one large volume without planning for cross-platform partition arrangement.
Advantage of 2.: You can use Time Machine with that Mac volume. Also, the Mac volume can be used with other Mac OS systems that do not have write enabled for NTFS.
-- For NTFS, and OS 10.6.8 or earlier, use NTFS-3G (free) to enable read-write in OS X.
-- For OS 10.7 or later, use Paragon NTFS For Mac (US$20) to enable read-write in OS X.
{In fact, the newest version of NTFS-3G seems to work in OS 10.7, but the developer has no install package, just source code. If you know how to compile it, you can use it with OS 10.7.}
@brisray:
Stand back. I'm going to shoot a few holes in your -- answer.
-- "Macs can natively read but not write to NTFS volumes.
Windows cannot read from or write to drives formatted in Macs."
Should be "Windows cannot natively mount drive volumes formatted Mac OS Extended." With HFSExplorer, free, Windows can mount a Mac volume and read files from it... but not write to it. With MacDrive or TransMac, Windows can mount and read-write Mac volumes.
-- "Macs can read and write NTFS volumes using MacFuse"
Not true MacFuse only allows using third-party drivers (technically, it allows creating a file system without root). Without the third-party driver, MacFuse does nothing.
-- "Windows (XP and above) and Macs (Snow Leopard and above) can read and write to exfat drives."
Not exactly. exFAT works with Windows 7 SP1 and above, plus Mac OS 10.6.4 and above.
Now for the real correct answer....
-- DO NOT USE ANY FAT FORMAT FOR ANY LARGE DRIVE VOLUME. That applies to both FAT32 and exFAT. Remember how XP would chop a drive into 32 GB partitions to use FAT32? That was because Microsoft knew how lousy and inefficient FAT is with large volumes due to cluster size increasing with volume size.
-- REAL ANSWER: Either 1. use NTFS with write enabled in OS X, or 2. use two partitions.
Advantage of 1: Files can be added to one large volume without planning for cross-platform partition arrangement.
Advantage of 2.: You can use Time Machine with that Mac volume. Also, the Mac volume can be used with other Mac OS systems that do not have write enabled for NTFS.
-- For NTFS, and OS 10.6.8 or earlier, use NTFS-3G (free) to enable read-write in OS X.
-- For OS 10.7 or later, use Paragon NTFS For Mac (US$20) to enable read-write in OS X.
{In fact, the newest version of NTFS-3G seems to work in OS 10.7, but the developer has no install package, just source code. If you know how to compile it, you can use it with OS 10.7.}
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