How can I share an external drive between a PC and a Mac?

Factual Questions
1

I have an external drive (attached via USB) that I want to use to backup data from both a PC and a Mac. The drive would only be attached to one or the other at any given time.

I partitioned the drive so I could make an NTFS volume for the PC and (my plan) was to format the remaining space as HFS for the Mac.

Unfortunately this plan does not seem possible. When I try to format the HFS partition it wants to format the whole disk as HFS. Might be a limitation of the tools I am using though.

Any ideas? Particularly ideas that do not require me to spend more money?

ETA: Any tools for the PC to format and/or access an HFS drive would be great.

2

I intend to do something similar so asked around a bit. I was told that the best way to use an externaly drive to transfer/store data for both pc and mac was to not format the drive at all. IIRC the drive is formatted with fat32 which will work for both systems. Once it is formatted for one platform, the other will not be able to utilize that drive. Someone did recommend partitioning the drive, but my need is to transfer large amounts of data from pc to mac so the original formatting on the drive should work well.

3

fat32 should work, with one big caveat: it doesn’t support files bigger than 4 gb. I dunno if that will be a problem for you. That will prevent you from from, say, storing very large or uncompressed video files on the external hard drive.

4

Yeah…FAT32 will not work because it actually is meant to hold large video files.

5

You could format it as NTFS, and then get MacFUSE and NTFS-3G to read it from the Mac side.

6

I had a similar issue, however as I have More PC’s and only one Mac so I went with NTFS formatted Drives and have NTFS for MAc OSX and NTFS-3G installed which allows me to write to NTFS drives from OSX.

While this does mean that I can’t use some automatic Backup Programs (Seem to have some issues ) I do most my Backups manually anyway so it works for me.

7

This. Unless you need a BOOTABLE Mac backup, this is a very good way to go.

8

If you only need to read it from the Mac side, you don’t need anything additional (if you’re running OS X 10.4.1 or later). Write support requires those additional tools.

Going the other way, the Boot Camp drivers that came with Snow Leopard include read-only support for HFS partitions in Windows. Lacking that, you can try HFS Explorer, which is read-only and doesn’t seem to work as well.

If you need write support for HFS on windows, MacDrive ($50) is probably the best or only way to go.

9

Drives have gotten cheap enough that I wouldn’t even mess with trying to make one all-purpose drive that’s got quirky limitations or dependencies on external software.