ext hard drive help

dinorock

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Mike
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hi all i probably set up (formatted) my external hard drive wrong when setting up my imac. pics save fine to it but can't be seen by my laptop running windows. have i used the wrong type of file system. i.e.not ntfs i think i used its formatted to mac os
extended (journaled) i'm pretty sure i saw someone else on here say they used their external drive on both pc and mac.

Q1 is this possible.

Q2 how do i do it

i understand i will need to move everything off the drive to my imac before i reformat just need to know how to get both pc and mac to "see" my files hope that makes sense cheers in advance mike
 
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if youve formatted as mac journaled then windows wont see it. if you format as ntfs you can read but not write (by default, unless you enable it via terminal or 3rd party app) on osx.

you could format as fat32 and both can read and write but personally id never recommend a non-journaled filesystem these days. also you have a 4gb individual file size limit if you have any large files.

so really you can either, format as fat32 and live with the limitations. format as ntfs and do the terminal command to enable ntfs writing on osx. or download and install a ntfs program on osx.
 
wow way beyond my technical ability might have to leave as is :bonk: but thanks for the reply
 
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