Formatting External Hard Drives
<h3 class="heading-h6"><a name="THLToolboxhomegtDevelopersZonegtExternalHardDrivesandHowtoFormatThem" class="anchorpoint"></a><a href="/tools/wiki/home.html">THL Toolbox</a> > <a href="/tools/wiki/Developers%27%20Zone.html">Developers' Zone</a> > External Hard Drives and How to Format Them</h3><p class="paragraph">
</p><h3 class="heading-h1"><a name="PurchasingandFormattingExternalHardDrivesforAccessbyBothMacandWindows" class="anchorpoint"></a>Purchasing and Formatting External Hard Drives for Access by Both Mac and Windows</h3><p class="paragraph"><strong class="bold">Contributor(s):</strong> Bob Campbell, Steven Weinberger
</p><h3 class="heading-h2"><a name="TypeofExternalHardDrivetoUse" class="anchorpoint"></a>Type of External Hard Drive to Use</h3><p class="paragraph">
As of December 2009, THL is using G-Technology, Inc. external hard drives. Purchase these from GovConnection (or CDW-Gov) with an LPO through Mick Watson.</p><p class="paragraph">Information to order from GovConnection:
<br/>2TB G-Raid Gen 4 Storage hard drive
<br/>G-Technology, Inc.
<br/>Item #: 10356351
<br/>Mfr #: GR42000
</p><h3 class="heading-h2"><a name="FormattingExternalHardDrives" class="anchorpoint"></a>Formatting External Hard Drives</h3><p class="paragraph">
Always format external hard drives in NTFS format. Windows reads and writes to this natively. Mac OS X reads and writes to it by installing the following free software: <img src="/" alt="external link: " title="external link"/><span class="nobr"><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/files/NTFS-3G%20for%20Mac%20OS%20X/2009.4.4/NTFS-3G_2009.4.4-catacombae.dmg/download" target="rwikiexternal">http://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/files/NTFS-3G%20for%20Mac%20OS%20X/2009.4.4/NTFS-3G_2009.4.4-catacombae.dmg/download</a></span></p><p class="paragraph">If you have questions about this software for Mac, see the following page: <img src="/" alt="external link: " title="external link"/><span class="nobr"><a href="http://www.ntfs-3g.org/releases.html" target="rwikiexternal">http://www.ntfs-3g.org/releases.html</a></span></p><p class="paragraph">You can also consult <img src="/" alt="external link: " title="external link"/><span class="nobr"><a href="http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/" target="rwikiexternal">http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/</a></span></p><p class="paragraph">Arin Bennett, manager of the Digital Media Lab, also suggested this method Jan 2010, but we would have to check to see 1) if a Mac could read the NTFS section of the hard drive and 2) if a Windows machine could read the FAT32 section:</p><p class="paragraph">You could partition the free space on your NTFS harddrive as FAT32 which would allow you to save your processed images and read/write on both PC and Mac. That is, you read the images off the NTFS partition and write the new images to the FAT32 volume.
</p><h3 class="heading-h6"><a name="ProvidedforunrestrictedusebythespanclassnobrimgsrcsakairwikitoolimagesicklearrowgifaltexternallinktitleexternallinkahrefhttpwwwthliborgtargetrwikiexternalTibetanandHimalayanLibraryaspan" class="anchorpoint"></a><em class="italic">Provided for unrestricted use by the <span class="nobr"><img src="/" alt="external link: " title="external link"/><a href="http://www.thlib.org" target="rwikiexternal">Tibetan and Himalayan Library</a></span></em></h3>