hiya everyone, i was just wondering if there is a known drive format that will allow me to both read and write files over 4gb in both windows and mac, iv got an external hdd split into two one with a fat32 format which is fine 'cus its only for uni work but the partition needs to hold files over 4gb in size, any help. oh yeah and i also want to be able to format it on my macbook as it is my main machine and my pc is not available to me at the moment

cheers

max

There are softwares that let macs wright NTFS format drives, and also software that lets PC's read and write the HFS+ format macs use, but no formats that I know of can read and write in both operating systems natively.

Here is a guide for reading and writing NTFS on macs

I don't know of any free programs that let PC's read and write HFS+ on Windows.

I don't think you can do what you want right now without it being pretty messy. OS X even with MacFuse and NTFS-3g won't format a partition that way. So you'd have to use a linux boot disk and partition/format that way to get started I think.

You get to the formatting screen in Windows installation, and you choose "NTFS".

As already suggested - your best bet is to go with NTFS and install the tools on the Mac side for accessing that file system. Those tools are much more mature than those for accessing HFS+ on the Windows side.