[Frodo Baggins]

I just bought a new (500 GB) HD to use as an external, mainly with my Macbook. However, I'd like to still use it with my Windows system on an occasional basis. It appears I have to first partition the drive before I use it -- how should I be doing it?

[Jon]

Depends...are you willing to spend anything in order to use it as a single drive? If so, format it HFS+ and get MacDisk for Windows, unless there is a better solution on the Mac side for reading NTFS.

There may be free utilities that allow read/write from one to the other but I'm Mac ignorant. Otherwise, make a 32GB shared FAT32 partition then format the rest in either NTFS or HFS+ (depending on your primary use, I guess), and go from there.

[Fathom1990]

There are various tools out there that let PCs run HFS+ formatted drives, but you might want to consider if you'd ever be likely use it on a PC other than your own, because if you went that way then any PC you wanted to use it with would have to have that software on.

I use MacDrive with one of my externals because I use it with my Xbox 360, which doesn't support NTFS and FAT32 has the file size limit. No idea why it supports a Mac file system... Anyway, there's probably a free alternative out there.