Format 500gb Hdd as FAT32?

tobywuk

tobywuk

New Member
Hello

I am having some trouble formating an external 500gb USB hard drive as FAT32.


Problem: Windows will not format a hard drive that is bigger than 32gb.
Why i want to do it: I want to be able to share the drive between a mac and a pc withought any read/write problems.


Can anyone help and suggest a way i can do this? Any little looks you know of that will work?
 
Multiple partitions in 32 gb sections. Then try mergint them with partition magic. It might work, or you can leave it in 32gb sections.
 
If you use a formatting tool that isn't windows you should be able to format it all as FAT32. In theory a FAT32 volume can be 8TB but windows 2k/XP. mkdosfs can format volumes larger than 32GB
 
Or, network the drive. OS X fully supports SMB (samba) so you can read/write/execute anything you want off a networked NTFS share, or any file system for that matter.

At home I have 2 NTFS drives, 4 HFS+ drives and two ext3 drives and all of them can read/write/execute over the network using samba.
 
so you mean attatch the USB hard drive to a windows computer and set it up as a shared drive on the network. then attatch my mac to the network and read the shared drive?

is samba set up as default on macOSX?
 
tobywuk said:
so you mean attatch the USB hard drive to a windows computer and set it up as a shared drive on the network. then attatch my mac to the network and read the shared drive?

is samba set up as default on macOSX?
Click to expand...

Dude, don't sweat it, it is soooooo easy. Download this free app and run it, then point to the network share on your windows box.

http://www.hornware.com/sharepoints/

On the windows side, share the whole external volume. Then on your mac whenever you want to connect just hit cmd + K (or click the Go menu then connect to server) and type in this

smb://ip.of.windows.box/shared_volume_name

plug in your settings and voila, it's as easy as eating pancakes

Oh yeah and make sure under System Preference > sharing windows file sharing is enabled. SMB requires authentication so you will be prompted for a user/password. Since it is your machines you should know this.
 
the only other option is creating the 32GB partition and leaving the rest of the drive as another partition formatted as ntfs...whatever works for your situation.
 
systek said:
the only other option is creating the 32GB partition and leaving the rest of the drive as another partition formatted as ntfs...whatever works for your situation.
Click to expand...

That would not allow his Mac to access the whole 500 gigs of space on his external HD, and it still would put the limit of 4 GB file size.

Networking them would be best, using the third party NTFS access software would be second. There are some weird things in the whole resource/data forks of things with NTFS and other non windows OSes and file systems. I am not sure that you won't have any issues down the road because MS has a closed source file system. The third party software could cause some stability problems down the road. The networking won't hurt a thing, and if you got Cat5e or Cat6 running around almost all NICs are gigabit these days anyways. So you may just want to get a gigabit switch/router.

Also, rysnc is your best friend for synchronizing folders over the network.
 
im just formating it as NTFS at the moment. When i get a mac it it will let me format the whole drive so i will wait and do that
 
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