External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting

External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting for mac os#
External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting mac os x#
External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting install#
External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting driver#

You can use this and still share FAT32 volumes with a PC, but if youвЂ™ll primarily be using the drive with Windows, and if the full capacity of the drive doesnвЂ™t exceed 2TB, the wiser course is to wipe the drive and then use WindowsвЂ™ Master Boot Record (MBR) partition scheme.ДЈ.

External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting mac os x#

By default, Mac OS X will use the GUID partition table to format the drive. Click the Partition button in Disk UtilityвЂ™s main window. To create a new partition, click the drive in the list on the left side of the Disk Utility menu. You can format the remaining space as a second FAT32 partition or as an HFS+ partition, or you can leave it as unallocated space. Mac OS X wonвЂ™t let you create a FAT32 partition larger than 2TB so if your drive is larger than that, youвЂ™ll need to divide the available drive capacity into multiple partitions.

External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting install#

Conversely, Windows 7 canвЂ™t read and write to drives formatted as HFS+вЂ“also known as Mac OS Extended (journaled)вЂ“unless you install third-party software such as ParagonвЂ™s.Дў.

External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting driver#

Macs running Snow Leopard or Lion can read from drives formatted as NTFS, but they canвЂ™t write to such drives unless you install a third-party driver or muck about in the Terminal. Windows prefers to use NTFS (which stands for New Technology File System, though it has been around for nearly 20 years now). Finally, Mac OS XвЂ™s Time Machine backup utility wonвЂ™t work with FAT32.

When formatting partitions, Windows 7вЂ™s Disk Management utility wonвЂ™t let you create one thatвЂ™s larger than 32GB, whereas Mac OS X Lion can create partitions as large as 2TB using its Disk Utility application. So if you work with bulky video clips, for example, adopting FAT32 may not be a good idea. FAT32 imposes a size limit of 4GB on single files. The chief drawbacks of FAT32 involve file and partition size limitations. Though this format has some limitations, it enjoys nearly universal support from active platforms, including Mac and Windows operating systems, and many gaming and Linux OSs. Once OS X Fuse and NTFS-3G are installed, your Mac should be able to read and write to NTFS disks just fine.Looking to share an external hard drive between a Mac and PC? The best way to do it is with a drive formatted as FAT32.

External hard drive for mac and pc without formatting for mac os#

Follow the instructions to download NTFS-3G for Mac OS X, whose development seems stopped right now but still works in Yosemite. Follow the directions on the OS X Fuse website to download and configure the software. NativeNTFS isn't for rookies: It's a bash script that needs to run from the Terminal command line and requires you to have root (administrator) access to your computer.ДЄn easier way to go is to download OS X Fuse, a third-party software tool that extends the Mac's file system capabilities. If you're a DIYer and you'd like to go the free route, you'll find a Sourceforge project called NativeNTFS-OSX that gets the job done. It includes several additional utilities for people who need to tinker or repair, to enable you to format drives with NTFS, check NTFS partition integrity, fix errors, and more. Paragon Software's NTFS for Mac 12 is another excellent choice. NTFS for Mac costs $31, and you can download a demo first to see how it does. It uses smart caching to keep data transfer as fast as possible and works with every OS X version since 10.4 (Tiger). Tuxera's NTFS for Mac is one of the best ways to do it. Whatever the case, the good news is that it's not a show-stopper: There are a few utilities out there that will enable Macs to write to mounted NTFS volumes. Maybe the drive you're using has to be used with a PC occasionally. Obviously that solution doesn't work for everyone.