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clancey
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Posts: 5

reformat external ntfs for mac(book) use? - 2007/01/04 18:27 I've had a Tvisto external drive for some time now. I set it up before I bought my Macbook, and when I tried to access it with my macbook I got a permissions error message. I looked around and saw that I should reformat the drive to either fat32, or hfs+ . I would prefer fat32 in case I still wanted to use a windoz 'puter at some time in the future. What's the easiest way to do either one? I have read that I would have to buy a third-party program to go from ntfs to fat32 on an xp machine - is there a way to do it with a Mac?

Thanks!

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swordbreaker55
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Posts: 104

Re:reformat external ntfs for mac(book) use? - 2007/01/10 01:53 You should back up anything on the drive that you "can't live without" before you decide to reformat or repartition., as a matter of course.

I've heard that you can use OS X's diskutil to dynamically resize and create partitions, but changing filesystems on existing drives is best left to third-party tools like iPartition, VolumeWorks, or DiskStudio.

Windows users only have one choice in PartitionMagic

If it's a large (>32 GB) drive AND you have one or more partitions >32 GB AND you don't have access to third-party tools, Windows 2000 and above should not be used to initialize the drive as these OSes will automatically format large drives with NTFS, but they can read FAT32 up to 2 TB Win95b/c, Win98/SE, and WinME can all format this as well as read it. So, if possible. , use any of those three OSes to format FAT32.

Nate

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