[xenithon]

Hi all. Just a quick question for anyone who can help: I have an external drive which is currently HFS+ formatted. I need to reformat it to NTFS (which is unfortunately not an option under OSX's drive utilities). There are a million and one articles online about converting the other way, but I have not found much in terms of converting from HFS to NTFS.

Thanks,
X

PS. Data is already backed up so can be wiped.

 

[SonicArmada]

You might want to try a Gparted live cd. You can boot Gparted off a disc, then reformat the drive from within it's graphical partitioning tool.

 

[Zanth]

Do you only have access to a Mac? The easiest thing to do would hook up the drive to a windows machine and format that way.

 

[grawk]

can't just put hfs drivers on the windows box?

And apparently, you can't do an ntfs format from mac, only fat32.

 

[xenithon]

Have access to Windows, yes. But from what I have read, it won't be recognized due to the different MBR format of HFS+

In case it makes a difference, it is a Seagate FreeAgent Pro connected via FW.

 

[Arainach]

On your PC, Right Click on "My Computer" and choose "Manage". Go to the "Disk Management" tab. You should see your External drive listed as "Disk 1" or "Disk 2" or something. It should have a partition. I'm not certain what the label will be, but "Unknown" is a high probability. Right-click on the partition and choose "Delete Volume". After it's deleted, Right-Click in the now-empty space and choose "New Partition". You probably want a Primary partition, but Logical should be fine. I think you'll be given the option to format the partition right then and there, otherwise after the partition is created it'll appear as a drive letter and you can format by right-clicking on it from "My Computer".

 

[jsbach]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xenithon /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hi all. Just a quick question for anyone who can help: I have an external drive which is currently HFS+ formatted. I need to reformat it to NTFS (which is unfortunately not an option under OSX's drive utilities). There are a million and one articles online about converting the other way, but I have not found much in terms of converting from HFS to NTFS. Thanks, X PS. Data is already backed up so can be wiped.

I've done this using:

ntfs-g: NTFS-3G for OS X Revived
macfuse: macfuse - Google Code

Macfuse is required by ntfs-g, after installing the two packages, you'll need to reboot, after which you can go into the diskutil and you'll have the option to partition to ntfs.

Hope this helps.

P.S Don't have a mac anymore, but if you have any issues shoot me a PM and I'll do my best to help you.

 

[Zanth]

I wasn't sure if ntfs-3g would let someone partition, just read and write to it.

As for the MBR, msdos instead of gpt for the type...Windows should have no troubles at all just formatting as Arainach outlined.

 

[jsbach]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zanth /img/forum/go_quote.gif I wasn't sure if ntfs-3g would let someone partition, just read and write to it. As for the MBR, msdos instead of gpt for the type...Windows should have no troubles at all just formatting as Arainach outlined.

ntfs-3g by itself wont be enough, that's where macfuse comes in. I had to do this a few months ago on a mac, and went this route and worked fine, I'm using that drive in Linux and Windows without issues, nor complains. Though works for me is not much of an argument, but it might be worth a shot.

 

[[zero]]

Couldn't you reformat to FAT under Disk Utility, then hook it up to a Windows PC and reformat to NTFS?

 

[xenithon]

Could yes; just wanted to avoid the multi-step process, and IIRC a FAT partition has a max. 32GB size limit? That would be painful on the 500GB drive