External Hard Drive – How to Format an External Hard Drive

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I just bought a hard drive of 500GB that I want to use on Mac OS X and GNU/Linux but be able to use some file on Windows.

Basically I have to deal with FAT32 (That doesn't support file over 4GB), NTFS without Mac OS writting support, HFS (Not working on Windows) and EXT3 (Not working on Mac OS X)

How should I do ? Having a NTFS partion, a HFS+ partition, a EXT3 partition and a FAT32 partition ?

Best Answer

You could go with an ext3 and mount it in Windows and Mac OS. I've used the Windows software before, worked fine, I can't personally vouch for ext2/3 on Mac OS, but it appears a valid solution.

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How to Convert an External Hard Drive to NTFS

Thanks for the responses guys! But I fixed the issue myself in the end...

What I did was use this command:

convert E:/ fs:ntfs /NoSecurity /X

This action disabled the UAC by disabling security and allowing all user access. /X dismounted the drive before conversion. It attempted the conversion. Chkdsk found errors on the drive.

I then ran this command:

chkdsk E:/ /F

(/F fixes any errors on the drive automatically)

It worked and fixed two corrupt file errors in insignificant files.

I then finally did the original command again:

convert E:/ fs:ntfs /NoSecurity /X

Conversion was successful this time and took about 20 minutes in total.

I can't begin to imagine how long it would have taken to copy 400GB from the drive via USB, format the drive and then put the data back - I guess DAYS!

Thanks again for your responses; I hope someone finds this useful in the future when trying to convert an external hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS without losing data.

Best Answer

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How to Convert an External Hard Drive to NTFS

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