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    External HDD Question

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by X3NIA, Jun 18, 2011.

  1. X3NIA

    X3NIA Notebook Evangelist

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    Completely new to OSX - I have an external hard drive that I use to store EVERYTHING important on (Music, documents and photos mainly)

    Is there anything I need to do in terms of formatting the HDD before I ship my windows laptop to get it to work "Flawlessly" with my new Macbook?

    I have it plugged into the Macbook and everything seems to be here, Just want to double check and see if I need to do anything.
     
    X3NIA, Jun 18, 2011
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  2. kornchild2002

    kornchild2002 Notebook Deity

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    There are a couple things you should know and they mainly revolve around the file system the hard drive is formatted in:
    1. Mac OS X cannot write to an NTFS formatted hard drive without a 3rd party program, it can only read NTFS formatted hard drives natively.

    2. FAT32 formatted hard drives cannot store files larger than 4GB though Mac OS X can read and write to them.

    3. Mac OS X can read and write to an exFAT formatted hard drive, that also works just fine with Windows 7.

    So you might want to think about formatting the hard drive to exFAT if you have files larger than 4GB yet want to be able to read and write data to the hard drive under OS X and Windows. Both Windows 7 and Windows Vista have built-in support for exFAT (I believe it is MS's file system anyway) and MS added that feature to Windows XP with the release of Service Pack 3.
     
    kornchild2002, Jun 18, 2011
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