[tablamaestro]

I have two laptops, a PC and and a Mac. Both purchased last year. Does anyone know if I can use an external hard drive for both computers? I imagine there would be formatting problems. Thanks for the help.

[HMB]

Yes, you can use the external hard drive on both. However, it must be formatted in FAT32 format (do that on your PC) in order to be read/write compatible with both the Mac and the PC. That requirement limits you to a maximum partition size of 32GB, so you may need to format the drive into several partitions if it is a high-capacity drive.

[agent86]

Is that really true? I could have sworn that I was able to copy files from my Mac to an external drive I had formatted as Windows NTFS (instead of FAT32). I could be mistaken, memory is the first thing that goes of course.
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I do agree that FAT32 drives have no problems at all, my USB Lexar jumpdrive is formatted as such and works perfectly on both platforms.
And I did eventually reformat that external drive I had to Mac's OS Extended (or whatever it's called) to use it with iMovie but I really thought I had used it with success on both my Dell and the Mac when it was a NTFS Drive.

[HMB]

MacOS 10.3.x is only capable of reading, but not writing, drive volumes formatted as NTFS.