Formatting usb hard drive

[davidcotton]

Hi

Want to reformat my usb hard drive (backed up everything)to hsf so that both the mac mini and pc can use it.

I've gone to disk utility but can't find hsf+ which I understand is the format to choose for file formats over 4 gig.

How do I get that option up so I can format the drive?

Cheers...

[Tenex]

You don't need HFS+ for volumes over 4Gb you only need it if an individual file is greater than 4Gb. If you use HFS+ the PC *won't* be able to read it. Use FAT32 unless you have files of 4Gb or more.

In disk utility select the drive to be formatted and then choose the Erase tab you can choose the preferred format there.

[markuswarren]

If you have files over 4GB in size then you're a bit stuffed. You'd need to use NTFS which the Mac will see, but it will mount the drive as read-only, so you can't save any files to it. The PC will be fine with that though. There are a couple of third party products that provide NTFS read/write capabilities, one of which is NTFS-Mac I've never used it so cannot comment on how well it works.

If you use HFS+ then the Mac will be ok with it but the PC won't read it. You'd need something like MediaFour's MacDrive on the PC to allow it to read HFS formatted disks. I do have this installed on my BootCamp partition and it does work very well indeed.

[Tenex]

If you want to read/write NTFS volumes take a look at MacFuse which is informally supported by Google.