How to Format a Drive for Mac and Windows

A lot of people buys external hard drive in these years. It provide huge capacity of drive with good pricing and it's portable!In July 2009 you can buy a 320 gb external drive under $100

You already have a external hard drive and need it to run on both Mac and PC?

Mac OS X uses a file format called HSF+ to manage its data. Windows can't read the format natively.
Windows uses NTFS and FAT32.
Mac can read NTFS but it can not write to.

Fortunately, Windows and Mac can read and write FAT32 format. FAT32 format used in early version of Windows.

So, the solution is to change the drive to FAT32 format. Here's how to format a drive as FAT32.

In Windows:
Plug in your drive. Wait until Windows recognize the it. Go to my computer and righy click on the drive. Don't right click on wrong drive or you will lose your data in the unlucky drive.
Select format and choose format.
Under file system choose FAT 32.
Press start.
Pres OK to affirm you really want it.
Wait until it finish.

In Mac:
For OS X, connect your drive.
Launch Disk Utility, or just type "disk utility" from spotlight.
Click on the drive you just connected. Don't click the wrong drive.
Then Choose Erase. This will erase all data on the drive.
Under Volume format, choose MS-DOS (FAT). Press Erase.
Press erase again to confirm.

What's the cons of FAT32? You cannot create file larger than 4GB. So you cannot copy your 6 GB single file raw video file into the drive. But it's OK for your other files sized under 4GB.