Format 250GB External Drive for Mac and PC

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Posted on 23rd December 2009 by sgrimm in Videos

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Seagate Portable Hard Drive with Dock

External Drive for Mac and PC?

Here’s a common problem, an external drive enclosure, a PC notebook computer and lots of files you want to transfer to a Mac. The drive enclosure comes pre-formated as NTFS. You go to format the drive as FAT32 because you’ve heard that both MAC and PC can read this format. But there is no option to do this in Windows XP!

You go to the DOS Command Prompt and try FORMAT using the FAT32 option. Success! Or so you think, it spends 30 minutes formatting away without any issues and as it gets to 99% it then reports something along the line that the disk size exceeds FAT32 limit.

You search and search the web for an answer, but they all say FAT32 has a 32GB limit and some suggest using FDISK to partition your drive. Finally, after a searching and trying all sorts of utilities I found something that worked!

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