How to use Seagate hard drive for both Mac and Windows

I recently bought a Seagate for Mac 1 TB external hard drive. When I connect to my MacBook through the FireWire, it works fine, but I also have media on my Dell laptop which is running Windows Vista. When I connect the hard drive to that laptop using the USB cable, Windows doesn't recognize it. What am I doing wrong?

Since you have a Seagate drive you are in luck!

Seagate has free drivers available to download for:

• Using Macintosh HFS+ filesystems on Windows computers
• Using Windows NTFS filesystems on Macintosh computers

Both are commercial products made by Paragon. See their homepages for:

• HFS+ for Windows® 10
• NTFS for Mac® 14

I'm not affiliated with Paragon. I just bought a Seagate drive to use on a Mac I just acquired though I've always had Windows machines. I've given them both a quick test and they seem to work well, but I haven't put them to extensive use this far.

If you open the Disk Utility application on your Mac with the disk connected, you should be able to see it in the list of disks on the left hand column of the Disk Utility window.

If you click on the the partition (i.e. the name you see in your file tree when the disk mounts under OS X) what do you see for the Format at the bottom of the window?

If it is Mac OS Extended or a something similar then your disk is using the HFS+ file system, which is the default for OS X. This file system type is not natively supported by Windows, which is why the disk will not mount when you plug it into your laptop.

You have a couple of options:

1. Reformat the disk to FAT32, which (as suggested by Michael Sturm) is the lowest common denominator in file systems between OS X and Windows. In addition to limitation to file sizes < 4 GB, you also lose a lot of nice features on HFS+ such as permissions and journalling.

2. Create a FAT32 partition on the disk along side the existing HFS+ partition. This could be used to move data between the Mac and the Windows machine, but would suffer from all the same FAT32 issues mentioned above.

3. Look at additional software which will allow for either NTFS or HFS+ to be read on OS X and Windows respectively. On the Mac, this can be accomplished using add-ons related to the MacFuse project. You should choose the filesystem that you plan on using most frequently so that it is as fast as possible and then reformat the disk accordingly. Using additional software like this will probably create a performance hit, but how noticeable it is depends on your usage pattern.

Its is probably the format of the drive. In general, Macs will read Windows formatted drives (FAT and, I believe NTFS), but Windows doesn't recognize Mac formatted drives (HFS+).

Depends on the filesystem type and partitioning scheme whether it'll work on both. If the hard drive were formatted for HFS it would not show up on the Windows Computer. If the Partition Scheme were Apple Partition Map, it would also not show up.

For maximum compatibility, back up everything from the external hard drive onto your Mac. Open Disk Utility, select the external hard drive and go to Partition. Under Volume Scheme, choose 1 Partition, then click Options. Choose Master Boot Record. Click Ok. Then choose MSDOS under the Format menu. Then click Apply.

Your hard drive should work on either computer at that point, as well as others you may try to use it on.

This is most likely related to the File System type that the drive was formatted with:

• Windows cannot use HFS+ (the Mac file system).
• Mac can not use NTFS (as far as I know), and the lowest common denominator -
• FAT32 - is not available as an option in the Windows Format Dialog (although I think there are tools to use it as it supports 2 TB Partitions).

File Size on FAT32 is limited to 4 GB though, disqualifying it for video applications.