How to use the same external hard drive for OSX and XP

Hello to all. First off, thanks for all of the helpful comments that have been posted in the discussion board, they have helped me a lot with my problems and curiosities. My question has been touched on in the past, but nothing concrete so I figured I'd ask a bit more specifically.
I recently loaded Windows XP (FAT32)onto my MacBook. Everything is running smoothly, but I was just curious how I could format my external HD so that both operating systems can read it, i.e. I only have 20 GB's partitioned for Windows XP, and i'll be using it to download music and movies. I would like to be able to play these straight from my external rather than use up the disc space. Let me know if anybody can help! Thanks.

Unfortunately, Disk Utility doesn't just move everything around. It has to erase everything, and then resize. I find it a little odd, seeing as other disk utilities can resize everything just fine. Anyway, yes, you will have to erase your drive to reformat it as FAT32. What I usually do is try to copy everything from the drive to free space in the internal drives. I haven't had too much data on my drive yet, so I've been lucky so far. I don't know if you have enough free space on whatever drives you have, but that's probably the best way to do it.
1) Transfer everything over to a folder on the internal drive
2) Use Disk Utility to reformat the drive as FAT32
3) Transfer everything back to the external drive
2.0GHz MacBook 1st Gen   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   2GB RAM

Similar Messages

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    jengwall,
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