I have a western Digital external HD formatted in FAT 32. It reads quite well on my apple and windows computers. Now, I can open and read a NTFS HD connected to my mac.

Jun 18, 2009 - Hi all. New Mac user here. I have a 1 TB Lacie hard drive that I used on my PC. I can't seem to be able to reformat it using the iMac utilities. Lacie Hard Disk Drive is an external Hard Drive that store lots of data. Sometimes, due to the corruption in the hard drive, all data gets corrupted. Try to recover them with the help of Stellar Mac Data Recovery Software.

How to format for pc and mac. Disk Utility, a free application included with the Mac OS, is a multipurpose, easy-to-use tool for working with hard drives, SSDs, and disk images. Among other things, Disk Utility can erase, format, repair, and partition hard drives and SSDs, as well as create RAID arrays.

I can even drag files from it onto my mac. I just can't write to it. But, I also have a Seagate FreeAgent Go that I formatted just for use on my mac.

I use this for storing large projects and software to transport from school, to work, to home. When I plug it into a windows PC running XP. It won't even be recognized as a hard drive. That is why I asked. If reformatting to FAT 32 for a PC to be able to read apple produced files is the only way, then it is the only way.

I will grant that I could have asked if there was a windows utility to allow a MS machine to read an apple formatted HD or that I could have been more descriptive of just what I wanted to accomplish. I may know a great deal about some complicated pieces of audio/video and graphic software but I am extremely ignorant about what makes my computer actually work. Thus, telling me that FAT32 is my only option would have been a wee bit more informative than stating 'then do that' was.

If you did the initialization, format, inside Disk Utility, you are done. It does not take much more that 30 seconds or so to initialize a disk. You can check by going to the System Profiler, Apple menu/About this Mac and then clicking More on the resulting window. Then choose the type of connection your external is using, Firewire or USB, and you will see details of everything connected using that method. You are looking for HFS+(journaled) Just as an FYI, Firewire is the preferred method of connecting external drives, including optical drives, to a Mac. I had a problem getting files from my old PC (Win 98) to my new iMac. I finally borrowed a HDD enclosure (Icy Box).

Put my old HDD in plugged it in and hey presto got everything I needed except my address book. I didn't even need to move the jumpers to 'slave'. I then thought about re formatting the disk for Mac OS using Disk Utility but then realised there may be a problem for PCs to read or write to the disk.