if its brown and mushy, dont eat it

Question
Can I use a Western Digital external hard drive on both a PC and a Mac?
Answer
It is possible to use a Western Digital external hard drive on both a PC and a Mac. There are a few things to keep in mind if you want to do this.

The external drive comes preformatted with one large FAT32 partition. Windows 98SE and later should not have a problem accessing this partition.

Macs, on the other hand, can only recognize FAT32 partitions that are smaller than 128-gigabytes when viewed in the operating system. So you should create two or more FAT32 partitions that are smaller than 128-gigabytes if your drive is larger than 128-gigabytges and you plan to use it on a Mac.

If you will be using multiple partitions, create the partitions while the drive is connected to the PC. If you are planning to transfer files larger than 4GB to the drive, there will be a 4GB file size limit on both the PC and Mac if the partition is FAT 32 . This is a file system limitation and there is no way around it.

If you use a PC running Windows 2000 or XP to partition and format the external drive, keep in mind that both of those versions of Windows can only create FAT32 partitions that are 32-gigabytes or smaller. This is an operating system limitation. To delete the existing FAT32 partition on the drive and create multiple, smaller FAT32 partitions, use Disk Management in Windows 2000 or XP.

You can download and use our FAT32 Formatting utility located in our Download Library to partition and format the external hard drive as FAT32.

Please Note: The Western Digital FAT32 Formatting utility can only create a single FAT32 partition the entire size of the external hard drive.

if its brown and mushy, dont eat it

anyone care to explain?

From anecdotal evidence, it would seem to me that apple computers have as many or more hardware issues than PCs. My personal experience is limited - I owned a Dell desktop for 5 years that I dumped off on my brother that still works fine and currently use an Asus laptop that I purchased in July. My girlfriend purchased an iMac in December and had issues with it shutting down from time to time. After several stops at the Mac store, they determined that her fan was malfunctioning and replaced several other components as well. My roomates Macbook pro, about a year old, recently stopped booting up, and had to be shipped off to be fixed. Does anyone have a better picture of technical issues with Macs?

i've had my iMac for about 1.5 years and have had absolutely NO issues whatsoever... as opposed to having various different issues with my previous PC's...
i'm not preaching to the choir or anything, but for me, I'm very glad i switched

Likely any issues with your previous PCs were related to Windows, not the PC itself. If you were a web dev or software engineer you might well be highly dissapointed in your Mac, as many have come to realize.

As to the original poster's question, I would surmise that you have to partition the drive in whatever way you can on whatever OS you can before doing anything with it. I recently got a Dell laptop and had to install Linux just to wipe the HD so I could install Windows on a partition and work from there. You also might want to see if the file system on the disk is proprietary...I bought a 4GB memstick that no other OS but Windows could read...Goddamn Memorex bastards.

Have you come across any hardware issues with Macs? Do I just have friends with terrible luck?

When I used a mac I still used the standard pc style mouse.