Tuxera (who develop one of the commercial NTFS drivers for Mac OS X) have a list of free NTFS drivers that are developed from the same NTFS-3G source used by Linux to read NTFS drives.

But if you didn’t foresee that, you may have formatted your drive with Apple’s HFS Plus, which Windows can’t read by default. For a while I've been using but as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since December 2008. If you know you’re going to use a drive on both Mac and Windows, you should use the exFAT file system, which is compatible with both.

I'd love for someone to tell me differently. Select the disk or partition you want to clone (in our example, there’s only one disk and the external drive) and click Next.

Now choose the language setting for the application (English or German). There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. First connect the external drive to your laptop. Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X.īe careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the 'Options.' button below the 'Partition Layout' control on the Partition pane).

Format hard disk mac and windows