Formatting an external Hard Drive for Windows using Mac OS X

Question

I have an external Hard Drive I'm selling. I'd like to be able to deliver to the hard drive to the buyer for it can be used on either Mac OS X OR Windows.

Is it possible to do this using the Mac OS Disk Utility? If so, which format, partition scheme or other options should I be using?

Thanks in advance!

Update: The key part of this is I need to format the disk from OS X. Disk Utility doesn't appear to use the same terminology (FAT, NTFS, etc.) I need to know what options to set in disk utility to give me a drive that's usable on either operating system.

Solution 1

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).

Solution 2

OS X can read NTFS file systems by using NTFS-3G. I use it on a pair of 500GB external drives that I use for backups between my various OS X and Windows boxes, and haven't had a problem with it yet.

Solution 3

You can format it to FAT, but not NTFS.

Comments

[rockit]

The OP wrote it would be used for either Mac OS X or Windows. Mac OS only has read-only support for NTFS.

[Mighty Mac]

That is incorrect, using NTFS-3G (see my answer below), you can format and read NTFS drives in OS X.

[Alan Storm]

There's no optional labeled Fat or FAat32 (or NTFS) in disk utility. What am I missing?

[Alan Storm]

Can NTFS be written to by the Mac? Can a PC format a drive so it's readable on both platforms?

[rockit]

This is pretty much news to me :) Thanks for the link.

[Alan Storm]

+1 for good info, but I'm not sure I want to ask Joe User to install FUSE on his box.