How to use an external drive for windows and mac

I recently got an external hard drive (2 TB seagate expansion) and I need to be able to use it with both my mac and my windows computer. I have read numerous forums and tried downloading various third party programs but nothing seems to work! One of the things i have read was to create a partition on the drive, this is easy enough and i did try it so i do have one side i can add stuff from from windows and one side i can add stuff to from my mac but then i cant access the other side. So say i need to get a file from my mac to my windows. I add a file to the mac side of the partition from my mac but then when i plug it into windows i cant retrieve that because its on the mac side of the partition (and vis versa). Is there some sort of easy way around this? or some way in which i can format the drive where i can move files back and forth from windows to mac without any expensive third party programs?
Thanks!
Bryan
PS. I did notice when i originally got the hard drive i had a bunch of files on it that were added from windows. When i plugged it into my mac i could see and copy these files but i could not add new files. Is there anyway to get around this "read only" type formate if i were to reset my drive back to its factory settings?

Three ways to go;
Repartiton the drive (1 partition) as MBR and with FAT32 file system. This is readable and writable by both Mac and Windows, but has a file size limit (which I think is 4GB).
The alternative is to leave the drive formatted as NTFS for Windows (this is not normally writeable from Mac) and employ a third-party software application which can write to NTFS. NTFS-3G, Paragons NTFS for Mac and Tuxera NTFS have all been recommended elsewhere.
Or you can repartition as GUID with HFS+ (Mac OS Extended Journalled) file system. This would not normally be accesible to the Windows machine, but once again there is 3rd-party softwsre available to enable Windows to read and write to it. MacDrive is the only one I'm aware of, but there are probably others.

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Use external drive for windows and mac

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Thanx.

If you want to use a disk for both PC/Mac file storage and Time Machine, you will have to create two partitions. Partitioning is sort of like creating multiple virtual disks on the same physical disk. One partition should be formatted for PC (which the Mac can also use) and the other should be formatted for HFS+ (Mac only) which is what Time Machine requires. The Disk Utility application makes partitioning and formatting very easy.

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if i set up my new external drive for time machine can i still put the pictures, movies from my 300g external drive and whatever new pictures, movies, etc. on my new 750g external drive?
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should i not use time machine?
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mac HD
capacity: 232.57g
available: 170.29g
iomega
capacity: 298.02g
available: 14.29g
one touch 4
capacity: 698.51g
available: 698.36g
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Hello!
I'm using an external USB/FW drive for back up. It's formatted as "OSX Extended".
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I don't recall either of those being mentioned in the OP's question, Niel. Only "backup" which does not necessarily mean Time Machine.
You might mention how much it will cost to buy MacDrive: Standard is $50 and Pro is $70.00.
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Hi,
I have been looking for this post!.
My girlfriend has a windows based laptop. I have a macbook pro and we both need to share an external hard drive (Maxtor 3200, 300gb). The external hard drive is currently formatted as NTFS. When I tried to access the drive from my macbook pro, it gives me an error, basically asking me to initialize the drive, which I won't do (got lots of data in it). After some net research, and reading this post I now know that I have to format it in fat32. I guess that my questions are:
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You'd get problems. The ports are equal though.
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/firewire/topic2199.html
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mrtotes

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Thanks, Niel and Bob
I found s/w called Tuxera NTFS for Mac allowing you to format NTFS on a Mac. Costs $31 but there's a 15 day free trial.
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An interesting & refreshingly honest comment (from the author?) about SL-NTFS at http://mac.brothersoft.com/sl-ntfs.html:
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I hope you all are well.
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How to use an external drive for windows and mac

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