PC-Mac external drive partition?

Asked by evander (465

) May 14th, 2008

I have a western digital external hard drive that I backed up my previous PC on. Now I have transitioned into a macbook and want to back up using the same external hard drive as I have a lot of space left. Can I partition the external drive and separate out the PC section and reformat a section to back-up my Mac? Or would I have to erase the hard drive, partition it, and then re-back up both computers? I’ve had a hard time finding info on how to do this on the Western Digital website, beyond how to partition the drive before you save anything on it.

Observing members: 0

Composing members: 0

3 Answers

http://www.prosoftengineering.com/products/drive_genius.php Drive Genius will let you re-partition on the fly. Give it a shot.

playthebanjo (2949

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…

using disk utility on os x you can split the disk making any partition you want without formatting the whole disk. Although depending on what format your disk is (most likely NTFS) you may need to format the drive to FAT 32 first. You can use disk utility for this as well.

joeysefika (3098

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…

With FAT32 you can use it on both platforms.
With NTFS it’ll work with PC, and only read on a Mac but you’ll need to MacFUSE to write.
With Mac OS Extended it’ll work with Os X, but won’t mount on Windows unless you have MacDrive.

ipodrulz (81

)“Great Answer” (1

) Flag as…