External HDD

andrew Marlowe

Hi I am getting my first Mac in a couple of days , Just a couple of simple questions. I am looking for an external Hard Drive around 250Gb so I saw on www.ukdvdr.co.uk a crowd I have used for a while for dvds ink etc a philips 250GB for £69 but it dosen't say Mac OS compatible anywhere just XP. is it just the formatting on the hard drives (NTFS I presume) or some hardware incompatibility
Next question is I am putting XP on my Mac so shoul the external drive work on that.
Final question is should I split it half NTFS and half MAC or all fat32
Thanks in advance

K.O.Kiki

• Any drive can be reformatted to work w/OSX as far as I know -- you're (probably) right in assuming that the HDD is NTFS formatted (OSX uses HFS+).
• If putting XP on the Mac (don't know why you'd bother, tbh...), then you don't even need to reformat it unless you want to use it in OSX as well.
• Finally, be aware that FAT32 partitions cannot be over 32Gb in size; more here. Having 32Gb FAT32 & the rest half/half NTFS/HFS+ isn't a bad idea (I think there's a program that lets WinXP read/write to HFS+ though, not sure)

scrapland

K.O.Kiki wrote:

I think there's a program that lets WinXP read/write to HFS+ though, not sure)[/list]

mac drive.

but I wouldnt let windows have access to my mac info, if windows gets a virus it allows access for the virus to mess up your OS X drive as well.