OT... Apple OS/HDD question please.

I know nothing "Apple"... Except for the kind we eat & drink.
My sister purchased a MacBook Pro and she has an HDD with backup photos etc. from when she had a Windows PC. She has asked if I could re-format the HDD for the Apple and I promised to look into it for her. All files have already been archived so no need to save anything on the Seagate HDD.
Looking for a link with instructions to either format for Apple with my Windows PC or her MacBook.

I found this but have not tried it yet, http://ask.metafilter.com/23808/please-help-a-mac-user-format-a-hard-drive-using-windows
does anyone know if it will work to simply delete the partition and plug it into the MacBook?

TIA!

I found one potential answer with a caveat by formatting FAT32 both OS's can read and write however the largest file size will be 4-Gig.
Hopefully this works for her.

FAT32 will do in both PC and Mac with the caveat of a maximum file size of 4GB and 2TB total for the entire drive; also, there cannot be any implemented security.

HFS+ is the native Mac format; you will need a Mac OS machine to format the HDD for HFS+.

After backing up the data elsewhere (off the HDD!) plug your HD into the Mac and open Disk Utility, which can be accessed by searching for it in Spotlight. Then, select your hard drive from the left sidebar. Now go to the Erase tab. In the Volume Format list, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then, click Erase at the bottom to format the drive.

dmargineau said:

FAT32 will do in both PC and Mac with the caveat of a maximum file size of 4GB and 2TB total for the entire drive; also, there cannot be any implemented security.

HFS+ is the native Mac format; you will need a Mac OS machine to format the HDD for HFS+.

After backing up the data elsewhere (off the HDD!) plug your HD into the Mac and open Disk Utility, which can be accessed by searching for it in Spotlight. Then, select your hard drive from the left sidebar. Now go to the Erase tab. In the Volume Format list, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then, click Erase at the bottom to format the drive.

Click to expand...

Thank you! And that was fast!

Come to find that this 64 bit version of Windows 7 no longer has "Format FAT32" or is it because the external drive is 500 Gigabytes? :-(

Looks like exFAT can be R/W by both OS's too, going to try that.

Windows won't let you format FAT32 beyond 32GB, though Third party tools can help.

exFAT would be a better option if it can be read by both OS's as it lets you store files larger than 4GB.

I'm curious, but have never tried formatting a drive as UDF. Unlike exFAT, UDF is not a patent encumbered format.

Use exFat if you can but the problem I have run into is that some programs/apps don't understand exFAT. I have both Macs and PCs. I am writing this on my old Mac Pro 2009.
Mac OS X will read NTFS but not write NTFS so that makes transferring files to the Mac easy.