Mac & PC access to an external drive

Delta Skies

Delta Skies

Messages
6,502
Name
Peter
Edit My Images
Yes
Our son got a 1.5Tb external drive for Christmas and is just getting around to setting it up for his Powerbook and PC. He is wanting it to have read/write from both machines. He's tried various ways to format them and seems to have got nowhere. Our latest attempt was to format the drive on the Powerbook (Leopard) as "MS-DOS (FAT)" as we couldn't see a FAT32 option. The drive now works ok with the Powerbook but the drive can't be seen when plugged into the PC.

The only thing we haven't tried is to format using MS-DOS command on the PC as formatting that way takes forever. Happy to do it if it works though.

Any suggestions out there would be greatly appreciated. There are quite a few links out there but some even contradict each other. Is it best to format the drive from the Powerbook or the PC?
 
a format from a command prompt without the quick format switch will take forever on a 1.5tb drive.

personally id concider formatting to NTFS or HFS and then get the app for the other OS that allows writing to that kind of file system. in fact someone posted a link to info allowing nativing writing to NTFS if i remember rightly.

personally id never recommend running a non-journalled file system these days.
 
Thanks for the replies.

I've just tried formatting it on the PC using FAT32 but it says the volume is too big. We then formatted it NTFS using the PC and partitioned the drive into two. We then plugged it into the Powerbook which could see the two partitions. We then formatted one of the drives to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The result is that the Powerbook can't even see either partition and the PC can see the NTFS partition but wants us to format the other partition.

It might make a difference using Snow Leopard but unfortunately the Powerbook has Leopard installed. The PC is a Windows 7 machine.

Any further thoughts would be well received.
 
I have a couple of drives that need to be seen by both Macs and PC's.

I got round the problem by formatting the drives to NTFS on the PC and then installing NTFS for Mac OSX. on the Macs

NTFS for Mac can be downloaded from the Paragon ( they wrote it) web site and costs around 25.00.

There is also a reverse program that allows PC's to read HFS files, but I'd stick to NTFS as I know it works
 
Apologies I'm a couple of days late in responding. Thanks to everyone for the advice. We went down the NTFS route using MacFuse and NTFS-3G and everything is working fine. My lad is now happily filling up the drive ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top