ChefDude

...actually mean? Mac OS Extended (Journaled)?

Bought a 2tb external WD drive, which is "Formatted for Mac", for the g/f

She's going to back up her photos/docs from a vista machine.

But then I am converting her machine to osx.

so...

Can I format the drive NTFS?

and when she's done with it, format it back to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)?

Markus

It'll be HFS+ rather than FAT16/32 or NTFS, so your thought of Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is probably spot on.

You could download a trial of MacDrive which will allow you to see HFS+ formatted disks in Vista (I have it installed on my Bootcamp volume, it's very handy). Then you could simply copy the files across, and when you switch to OS X you don't need to do anything else to the drive.

I'm not sure what limitations there are in the trial, might just be time based though. Could be worth a shot.

Otherwise, your thinking is correct, format it as a windows compatible format, copy over the data, switch to OS X, copy data from drive, and reformat to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Now, one BIG point here. If you format as NTFS then under OS X, without third party apps, or modifying things (trust me, don't go there) then OS X will only mount NTFS drives as read-only. Thus you can copy the data from the drive to the machine, however, you won't be able to write to the drive, you'd need to reformat it to be able to write to it.
If you format the drive as FAT32 then it WILL be read/write under OS X, but if you're planning to use it long term on the Mac I'd seriously suggest you reformat it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

ChefDude

Thanks Markus! Most useful