(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); I'm at my dad's for the summer and he just gave me his 1TB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-Portable Drive for Mac. To use this drive on a PC, you have to download additional software. I live with my mom and the house is filled with PCs, no Macs, so it would be a hassle to download the additional software on every single computer. If I reformatted the drive to FAT32, would I have to worry about downloading the additional software? Would doing this cause any technical issues with the drive? If I were transfer files with my friends and they have Macs, would the drive not work?

It's Mac OS X Extended I believe. From my knowledge I think that this should work out just fine. If you were to format it in Windows to Fat32 it should still show up on a Mac as long as you have Mac OS X v10.6 or above. So I don't think that something could go wrong. But please keep in mind that you WILL LOOSE ALL DATA. Please keep in mind that this is just from googleing, and I am no expert on Macs. I do believe that if something were to go wrong you would still be able to plug it in to a Mac and reformat it to HFS+ and not have any issues.

Good day. Reformatting a drive will ca everything that is on there but it will NOT damage the drive. By formatting it all you are simply doing is rearranging the filesystem. For example its like changing from alphabetical order to reverse alphabetical order.
Please keep in mind that when you format it to fat32 that you can only transfer files less than 4gb at a time. But this is the best solution as both windows and mac support fat32 read/write.

Turns out I can't even format to FAT32, only NTFS. FAT32 is for devices 32GB and lower. I formatted to NTFS anyways, but thanks for the help guys!