Help! PC clients can't read drives with my P2

[nedmiller]

I had two clients in the last week who use PCs. 95% of all my clients have Macs. I was under the impression that I had to format the drives (Lacie Rugged and Quad) using Disc Utility the MS DOS FAT option.

Both clients, one using Windows 7 the other XP, say the drive is not coming up. Does anyone have a solution?

Thanks!

 

[SimonW]

Even though OS X can format drives into a FAT32 format, by default, Apple uses a partition table scheme Windows cannot read.

That's strange. I've handed off a lot of hard drives that I have formatted FAT32 with OSX and haven't had any issues.

Best utility to get is NTFS For Mac. This enables you to format NTFS drives with Disk Utility.

Just as a FYI, FAT32 is limited to 32 GB in total disk size.

No it isn't. There's a 2GB limit on file sizes. The 32GB limitation is only during the Windows XP installation process. Once the OS is installed you can format and read FAT32 drives up to 8 Terabytes in size.