Formatting Your USB Key. To start off with, you’re going to want to format your shiny new USB key. By default these things come pre-formatted using the MS-DOS (FAT32) filesystem as it is compatible under Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. If you want your USB key to work on most systems, I recommend using FAT32.
FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility; a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X. Be careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the 'Options.' Button below the 'Partition Layout' control on the Partition pane). The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4.
Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. I'd love for someone to tell me differently. For a while I've been using but as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since December 2008. Tuxera (who develop one of the commercial NTFS drivers for Mac OS X) have a list of free NTFS drivers that are developed from the same NTFS-3G source used by Linux to read NTFS drives. My answer from a similar question: If you're working exclusively with 10.6.6 or greater on the Mac side, try.
Native read/write support under Windows and OS X, and none of the file size limits of FAT32. Disk Utility will happily format your drives using it. It's probably your best option, as it avoids any user-space filesystem drivers, which personally make me a bit uneasy.
XP and Vista support exFAT with appropriate updates: Vista as of SP1, and XP with SP2 and the Also a good point from the above posters re: MBR vs. GPT on 32bit systems. NTFS is a better filesystem than fat32 and is well supported by many OSes.
OSX has several approach accessing NTFS read-write. The open-source solution is to install ntfs-3g with macports, and modify your system's auto-mount script. The disk can be formatted with windows, or with ntfsprogs on a mac. Fl studio for mac free download.
( filesystem operations always envolve risk, and very likely lots of command-line work.) NTFS is the native windows filesystem. It's open-source drivers work quite stably and reliably. NTFS will work like a charm if you'll ever need linux support. If you don't feel comfortable altering the system yourself, paid softwares and services can always be found. I can post my ntfs auto-mount script for mac if you can't find one with google.
If you open the Disk Utility application on your Mac with the disk connected, you should be able to see it in the list of disks on the left hand column of the Disk Utility window. If you click on the the partition (i.e. The name you see in your file tree when the disk mounts under OS X) what do you see for the Format at the bottom of the window? If it is Mac OS Extended or a something similar then your disk is using the HFS+ file system, which is the default for OS X. This file system type is not natively supported by Windows, which is why the disk will not mount when you plug it into your laptop. You have a couple of options: • Reformat the disk to FAT32, which () is the lowest common denominator in file systems between OS X and Windows.
In addition to limitation to file sizes. Depends on the filesystem type and partitioning scheme whether it'll work on both. If the hard drive were formatted for HFS it would not show up on the Windows Computer. If the Partition Scheme were Apple Partition Map, it would also not show up.
For maximum compatibility, back up everything from the external hard drive onto your Mac. Open Disk Utility, select the external hard drive and go to Partition. Under Volume Scheme, choose 1 Partition, then click Options. Choose Master Boot Record. Then choose MSDOS under the Format menu. Then click Apply. Your hard drive should work on either computer at that point, as well as others you may try to use it on.
If you want something that both machines / OSes can read a write, and that can act as an emergency boot drive for either machine, do this: • Reformat the drive, using the GUID Partition Table (GPT) as the low-level partition table format. Avoid Master Boot Record, which Intel Macs can't boot from. Also avoid Apple Partition Map, which Windows machines would have no clue about. • Give the drive one HFS+J (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) partition large enough to install Mac OS X onto (10GB+). This volume format accommodates Mac OS X and Mac files the best. • Give the drive one FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition, which both Mac OS X and Windows can read and write.