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(Solved) - Seagate Expansion Drive: both windows and mac compatible???

(8 posts)
  • Started 1 year ago by kush20197
  • Latest reply from owen123
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kush20197
Posts: 37

I have a seagate 500GB expansion drive which i brought about a year ago. I was using windows at that time, so i had no problem with it. Recently, I have switched to mac and saw that my hard disk was not writable on mac. One of my friends told me that I had to format the hard disk on mac, but I checked it on the internet that if we do it, we would not be able to write anything on it from windows. I have a lot of data in it and I don't want to format it without the right information. So, is there any way to make it writable both on windows AND mac???? I need this as my school has windows pc's and I have a Mac, so it would be convenient that way.
Thank You.

Posted 1 year ago #
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vistamike
vistamike
Posts: 10945

kush20197 have moved this to correct forum.

Mike

Posted 1 year ago #
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Xhi
Xhi
Posts: 6298

As far as I know Windows and MAC use different disk formats and they are not compatible. This may also be true of the data formats you are trying to take back and forth. Even if you could write to it you would not be able to use the data on the other system.

Posted 1 year ago #
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kush20197
Posts: 37

Actually, I am able to copy data from the hard disk to my mac, but I can not delete or add any data to my hard disk from my mac. So does it mean that if I format it in Mac, I won't be able to write anything on it from windows???

Posted 1 year ago #
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Xhi
Xhi
Posts: 6298

That would be my guess.

Posted 1 year ago #
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minigeek
minigeek
Posts: 353

A quick google turned up this page.

Any help?

Also, are you storing any single file larger than 4gb?

Just remember that a format will DLETE ALL of the data on the drive.

MiniGeek

Accepted Answer · Posted 1 year ago #
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kush20197
Posts: 37

Thanks for that minigeek, it helped me in understanding the file formats.

Posted 1 year ago #
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owen123
owen123
Posts: 800

If you want you could have partitions of your hard drive up to 32GB in fat32 which can be read by Mac and Windows. However there is software which claim to be able to format fat32 larger than 32GB. You could also have it in NTFS (windows) and use a program on Mac to Mount to NTFS, check this out;

http://www.macupdate.com/app/m.....r-mac-os-x

Good Luck

Posted 1 year ago #
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