How to format hard Drive to work as an internal and external on MAC?

deefadog

Hi all, i hope this is possible - What i want to do is Format my 1TB 3.5 HD to work as an internal drive (G5 Tower) and as an external drive (in a USB enclosure).

The reason is i want to copy large amount of data and it's much quicker when it's internal.

When i format as an external or internal when i switch it it just says this disk cannot be read.

Is there a way to do this please??

MDBJ

Are you running Snow Leopard by any chance? If so you could enable native NTFS read/write then format your drive in NTFS which would allow it to be read as an external or internal drive. This would have the added benefit of allowing the drive's contents to be read on other machines using different OS's including Windows and Linux.

Instructions here

Mondez

What machines are you moving between? If you are just moving between machines that run OS X and don't plan to boot off the drive, use Disk Utility to format the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and you should be good to go. It might be a good idea to repartition it as one partition so it creates the correct partition layout, but that should only be important if you want to boot from it on one of your machines.
If you are trying to move it to a windows machine then you will need to use NTFS as suggested using NTFS-3G (since you can't have Snowleopard on a G5 system and I wouldn't use the experimental NTFS write support anyway).

deefadog

Thanks for the help!

Turned out the G5 was on leopard and Laptop on Snow Leopard - after upgrading the G5 it works flawlessly!

Thanks for the help! Much appreciated!