Hello and welcome to Computer Fitness’ Blog! My name is Josh. Computer Fitness is a tech support firm for small and medium businesses in Reisterstown, MD. Our areas of expertise run the gamut from workstation repair to server maintenance.
So you’ve got a Mac and that’s awesome. You like the OS, the feel, whatever. However, you still need to run some Windows apps so you figure you’ll do that natively. It makes sense. So you get your copy of Windows and your Mac OS X disc and begin the process.
Now that you’ve gotten Windows installed, you’ll need to access your Mac side unless you want to waste precious disk space. The best part is, you can do this. First, make sure you have the latest version of Boot Camp for Windows. It comes from the OS X disc and is also available online from Apple. Once you install it, you can get read-only access to your OS X side! However, let’s say you have an external drive.
If you have an external drive, you will likely want to share files. To do this, you will need to format the drive. In Windows, view the drive in My Computer and right click on it. Now, format it in FAT format. This stands for File Allocation Table format. This is the only format that both Windows and MAC can read/write to.
Lastly, if you want to use part of your external as a Time Machine drive and the other half for Windows, you can do that, too. Open up Disk Utility in Mac OS X and select the drive you want to partition. Then, drag the slider on the left to indicate how you want it split. Now, you can partition the drive. Next, format one part as Mac OS X Journaled and the other as FAT. You can now use an external drive as two different drives!
-Josh
Computer Fitness
Onsite and Remote Tech Support
Tags: Apple, Formatting, HDD, Windows
