got an external drive...mac/pc questions

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shackrock

New member
so at school, we use all MACs. at home, I use a PC. This quarter we all picked up an external HD to store all of our stuff on for the rest of the sequence of classes.

My question:
This thing has to be formatted to MAC, of course, because the point of it is to use it with school. But I'd LOVE to bring all this stuff back to my computer, the PC, at the end of the day. Is there anyway to copy stuff over to my PC (NTFS) from that mac formatted harddrive? Anything like that?

if nothing like that is possible, what about making half the drive pc and half mac - is that possible? ha. so I could use like 50 gig for school and the other 50 just for more storage space at home for me? thanks all.

btw, it's a firewire drive.
 
yeah but apparently FAT32 on new macs will only read the drive up to 9gigs, then it starts acting crazy, corrupting data...true?

basically is there any software for PC that will at least READ the mac formatted drive?
 
shackrock said:
yeah but apparently FAT32 on new macs will only read the drive up to 9gigs, then it starts acting crazy, corrupting data...true?
Click to expand...

I haven't seen any reports of that. If you're seeing such behavior, let me know. I periodically eat lunch with the people who would be responsible for fixing such a bug. If you can reproduce such a problem, I'll pass it on to them.
 
I've not heard of this 9 gig thing, but I have heard of large drives (like 100GBs, such as yours) to crap out if they're formatted as FAT32 no matter what OS you're using.

AFAIK, Apple has yet to have write support for NTFS support.

It would be possible though, as you said, to have 50GB NTFS, and 50GB HFS+.
You just wouldn't be able to interchange between them. (Though you should be able to at least READ the NTFS partition on the Mac.)

You need to format and partition it using the Disk Utility on the Mac.
Come to think of it, the Mac may only format in FAT32 for Windows, depending on your OS. You could format it as FAT32, and then reformat the partition on your PC.
 
alex, thanks man that's what I was looking for.

I also found this software - mac opener - that seems to read the HFS+ drives, for windows XP. We'll have to see if it works, haha.

but thanks.

last thing - can I set up these partitions on my windows XP computer? or will I have to wait to use that disc utility on the my OS X machine? thanks again
 
I very much doubt you'll be able to setup any Mac partitions on your PC, but you can most likely make two partitions now, making one NTFS, and leaving the other one unallocated (blank) or maybe like, FAT32. Then you can take that second partition and reformat just that when you get to a Mac.
 
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