I recently purchased a 1TB Seagate Go Flex external hard drive and I wanted it to be readable in both PC and MAC computers. I used it initially with a PC and now I could not transfer files from my MAC book to it. How do I go about this?
Hi,
There are several solutions for your problem. I am enlisting them here. You can choose any which suits you best.
1. As your hard drive is 1 TB you can have 2 partitions on it, One for MAC and one for windows. For example choose 500 GB for Windows and 500 GB for your MAC. Then you can use it on both MAC and windows. But in each operating system only 500 GB will be available for use.
2. FAT32 is also supported by both MAC and Windows. So connect your hard drive with Mac and make partition of FAT32 or any variant of FAT. Now you can use it on both.
3. There are some ntfs software available for MAC to run ntfs partition. Just download a software and install it on Mac and now your hard drive is operable in both MAC and Windows. You can download ntfs for Mac here:
You can try any of the above.
If the drive is to be used with a Mac computer, it must be formatted with either FAT32 or exFAT file system. Also, if you need to share one hard drive for both Windows and Mac, you need to use the correct file system. With Mac, whatever hard drive works on a normal PC should also work with a Macintosh computer.
The only problem you may encounter is with the file system because Microsoft Windows and OS X use different file systems by default. In Microsoft Windows beginning in Windows XP, the default file system is NTFS. In OS X, it can access hard drives formatted in NTFS but it’ll only work in read-only state by default.
If you need a hard drive that can be accessed by both Microsoft Windows and OS X, you need to format the hard drive with either FAT32 or exFAT file system. Microsoft Windows supports three file systems: FAT32, NTFS, and exFAT. Of the three, FAT32 is the oldest file system available to Windows. With FAT32, you can’t have a file larger than 4 GB.
