Formatting an external Hard Drive for Windows using Mac OS X

"The ""out of the box"" answer appears to be use FAT32, and deal with the limitations of not having a file larger than 4gb.

To achieve this using the OS X Disk Utility in 10.5, you'll want to attach your drive, open Disk Utility, select your drive (and not the partition) from the left hand window-pane/menu, and select MS-DOS (FAT) from the Volume Format drop down.

Finally, as mentioned by bcwood and of possible interest to power users, NTFS-3G is a FUSE filesystem that enables read/write access for NTFS file systems in OS X (out of the box NTFS is read-only in OS X)."

"The ""out of the box"" answer appears to be use FAT32, and deal with the limitations of not having a file larger than 4gb.

To achieve this using the OS X Disk Utility in 10.5, you'll want to attach your drive, open Disk Utility, select your drive (and not the partition) from the left hand window-pane/menu, and select MS-DOS (FAT) from the Volume Format drop down.

Finally, as mentioned by bcwood and of possible interest to power users, NTFS-3G is a FUSE filesystem that enables read/write access for NTFS file systems in OS X (out of the box NTFS is read-only in OS X)."

Agreed, FAT32 is the way to go. Fat32 cannot hold single files that are larger than 4GB. This can be be a problem for backups and disk images.

"As Richard said, you'll need to format it as FAT, if you need to format it through OSX.

But if you can format it with Windows, then I'd recommend FAT32 as it's a big improvement over FAT.

But, there is also a piece of software that can be run on windows to read Mac disks, called MacDrive."