Hi all

I have a samsung hard drive Spinpoint HM501II It intermittendly stops working. I have ran the windows scan disk and it passed the sea tools long generic test it also passed. All seems fine but a can not copy anything to the drive. I low level formatted the drive thinking it will solve the problem but it prevails is there any other help someone can offer

Hi everyone, I just got a new iMac and I plugged in my external USB hard drive, I can read and copy files from it, but then I can't delete anything off of it? I'm told it's because it's formatted as NTFS, how can I make my new Mac use my drive as it is without formatting it just for macs? I'd like to still be able to put photos, music, etc. on it that I'd be able to plug into and view on PC's. Is there some easy (preferably free) way to do this?

Way to make Macs user-friendly, Apple!

From time to time there you might find the need to reformat your computer. Some of the reasons that folks reformat can be anything from having a virus issue, just wanting to wipe the files clean for a fresh start or upgrading to a new Operating System. Regardless of the reason, doing a reformat really isn't that hard and anyone can do it. So let me show you in a step by step tutorial. Because I'm a very visual person I included photographs as I went along reformatting my son's laptop.

If you haven't noticed one huge change with Windows 7 is that FAT32 is no longer an option when formatting drives. You are now left with the options of either NTFS or exFAT. OK so your asking what is exFAT? Well its not FAT32, actually its compatible with FAT64.

I was getting ready to format a external hard drive to FAT32 and the only option I have besides NTFS is exFAT. Any clue on what exFAT is and is it compatible with FAT32?

I was reformatting it for that one awesome DVD player to watch movies on but it has to be FAT32. Any clue? I'm too tired to google, nite.

So alot of the older External Hard Drives come formatted as FAT32 as does alot of Flash Drives. What is the difference between the different formats?

Well, basically if it's formatted as FAT32 it will only allow files that are 4GB and under. If you format it as NTFS then you can add larger files to the drive. NTFS is also more stable, and gets fragmented less often, meaning better performance.