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Buying my first Mac. Need external hard drive advice
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Exedus
New Member
 
Join Date: May 2006
 
2006-05-22, 10:48

Hello all. I came here the other week looking for advice on my Mac purchase and you were all a big help. I've decided on the iMac 17' to be used with my external 19' Samsung LCD monitor. I have 2 external hard drives that use to back up all my important data. Since I'm selling my PC I'll have to back everything up so I can transfer it to the Mac. I've heard that the drives will need to be partitioned to FAT32 to work on the Mac, is this true? I really need to know as I'll have to reformat them and then back up everything again before I sell the PC.
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Dave
Ninja Editor
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Bay Area, CA
 
2006-05-22, 10:51

Eh, sorta. Macs can read, but not write, NTFS partitions, so in theory you can hook them up to your mac, copy the data over, then format them however you want (I recommend HFS+, FWIW).

Reading and writing FAT32 *shouldn't* be a problem. I don't think you can boot from it though.
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Luca
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2006-05-22, 12:04

Right. You can't boot from FAT32 on a Mac, the drive name has to be short and in all capital letters, and there's a maximum file size limit of 4 GB. Also, reading from and writing to that hard drive will be slower since FAT32 support in OS X isn't perfect.
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