Formatting a drive for Mac on a PC? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

t3m3st · 01-30-2004, 09:30 PM

OK. I needed to buy an external firewire harddrive for school. At school, I work on a Mac, at home, PC. I need to have this hardrive converted to whatever the Mac standard is. Right now, its NTFS. I have a program called MacDrive that will let me read the hard drive at home, so yippee there, that problems solved. My problem is that I cannot format my drive from school without administrator priviledges. Apparently the school's tech guys aren't willing to do this for us, so I need to find a way to format it for use on a Mac, by Tuesday. Is there a PC program that might let me do this? Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for whatever help you my fellow TFP'ers can provide!

yakimushi · 01-30-2004, 09:41 PM

I do believe that Macs will read FAT32 partitions.

t3m3st · 01-30-2004, 09:46 PM

I have WinXP
maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I'm only seeling ntfs as an option

my way being- My Computer>manage>storage>format

merkerguitars · 01-31-2004, 02:02 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by yakimushi
I do believe that Macs will read FAT32 partitions.

You are correct!

Quote:

Originally posted by t3m3st
I have WinXP
maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I'm only seeling ntfs as an option

my way being- My Computer>manage>storage>format

How big is the hard drive...I know hard drives above 40gb I think can't be formatted as FAT32...maybe if you make it into smaller partition chunks. Or use a third party utility like partition magic might get it to format.

t3m3st · 01-31-2004, 08:53 AM

partition magic did it
thanks soo much

t3m3st · 02-02-2004, 04:22 PM

Nope. Mac G4's at school won't read a fat32 drive. Any other suggestions?

Edit from next day: It works on older macs it seems, but not the G4's...

01-30-2004, 09:30 PM	#1 (permalink)
t3m3st Vroom! Location: Toronto	Formatting a drive for Mac on a PC? OK. I needed to buy an external firewire harddrive for school. At school, I work on a Mac, at home, PC. I need to have this hardrive converted to whatever the Mac standard is. Right now, its NTFS. I have a program called MacDrive that will let me read the hard drive at home, so yippee there, that problems solved. My problem is that I cannot format my drive from school without administrator priviledges. Apparently the school's tech guys aren't willing to do this for us, so I need to find a way to format it for use on a Mac, by Tuesday. Is there a PC program that might let me do this? Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for whatever help you my fellow TFP'ers can provide! __________________ I do it for the rare drops

01-30-2004, 09:46 PM	#3 (permalink)
t3m3st Vroom! Location: Toronto	I have WinXP maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I'm only seeling ntfs as an option my way being- My Computer>manage>storage>format __________________ I do it for the rare drops

01-31-2004, 08:53 AM	#5 (permalink)
t3m3st Vroom! Location: Toronto	partition magic did it thanks soo much __________________ I do it for the rare drops

02-02-2004, 04:22 PM	#6 (permalink)
t3m3st Vroom! Location: Toronto	Nope. Mac G4's at school won't read a fat32 drive. Any other suggestions? Edit from next day: It works on older macs it seems, but not the G4's... __________________ I do it for the rare drops Last edited by t3m3st; 02-03-2004 at 08:11 PM..

01-30-2004, 09:41 PM	#2 (permalink)
yakimushi Addict	I do believe that Macs will read FAT32 partitions.