external hard drive and windows files

ok, so i just picked up a seagate 300gb external hard drive to keep work files seperate from my ibook's hd and portable. i have a lot of mp3's on two windows machines that i would like to store on my external hd as well, in a second partition, so i can listen to my music at work on my ibook, cut my last tie to the windows boxes (i have about 60gb total, so there is no way i could fit it all on my ibook's hd). my seagate manual recommends installing drivers on my windows machines to allow the windows system to read and write to a drive formatted for mac os. i am having trouble finding these drivers needed. does anyone have any recommendations on where to look or what to use?

thanks,
jim

That's because they don't exist as far as I know, People have always just used the FAT32 partition schema to do it because both OSs read it. Unless MS or somebody recently developed a driver that would read an HFS partition. Which I would have been using instead if there were any.

Does the drive come with a CD?

The best filesystem to use would be HFS+. it is the default filesystem for mac, and there are installable drivers for Windows. However, I don't know of any free ones. After a bit of google-searching, I was able to come across something called "MacDrive", though I haven't tried it out personally.

It has a free trial, so you may as well give it a shot, and let us know how it turns out!

I found MacDrive Also.

I'm not sure how you can definitively state that there are drivers though, if you don't either have them, or know where to get them.

Reading various things on the net, I came across quite a few references that you can, and also our own Mac57 telling me about them previously.

There are no "free" drivers for Windows to read a Mac disc, period. Format the drive as FAT-32 and you'll be fine. You won't suffer any noticeable degradation of use, but avoid files over 4Gb in size since FAT32 has a limit.

Slokunshialgo said:

The best filesystem to use would be HFS+. it is the default filesystem for mac, and there are installable drivers for Windows. However, I don't know of any free ones. After a bit of google-searching, I was able to come across something called "MacDrive", though I haven't tried it out personally.

It has a free trial, so you may as well give it a shot, and let us know how it turns out!

Click to expand...

thanks dude, i'll give it a shot tonite and see how it works.

btw, whats HFS+?

metaljim said:

thanks dude, i'll give it a shot tonite and see how it works.

btw, whats HFS+?

Click to expand...

"Hierarchical File System" AKA "Macintosh OS Extended"

baggss said:

There are no "free" drivers for Windows to read a Mac disc, period. Format the drive as FAT-32 and you'll be fine. You won't suffer any noticeable degradation of use, but avoid files over 4Gb in size since FAT32 has a limit.

Click to expand...

And FAT-32 has a partition limit of 32GB, which means that he would have to have 10 partitions to use the entire drive.

Just as a suggestion for you, though: Since you have a 30GB drive, you should probably keep at least 1 F32 partition, in case you ever need to use it with other Windows computers that don't have the drivers installed.

Slokunshialgo said:

The best filesystem to use would be HFS+. it is the default filesystem for mac, and there are installable drivers for Windows. However, I don't know of any free ones. After a bit of google-searching, I was able to come across something called "MacDrive", though I haven't tried it out personally.

It has a free trial, so you may as well give it a shot, and let us know how it turns out!

Click to expand...

MacDrive works very well in allowing the pc to access a mac formated drive. Of course, it isn't free, but it does solve the mac\pc format problem.

Slokunshialgo said:

The best filesystem to use would be HFS+. it is the default filesystem for mac, and there are installable drivers for Windows. However, I don't know of any free ones. After a bit of google-searching, I was able to come across something called "MacDrive", though I haven't tried it out personally.

It has a free trial, so you may as well give it a shot, and let us know how it turns out!

Click to expand...

MacDrive works very well in allowing the pc to access a mac formated drive. Of course, it isn't free, but it does solve the mac\pc format problem and avoids the fat problems...

Slokunshialgo said:

And FAT-32 has a partition limit of 32GB, which means that he would have to have 10 partitions to use the entire drive.

Just as a suggestion for you, though: Since you have a 30GB drive, you should probably keep at least 1 F32 partition, in case you ever need to use it with other Windows computers that don't have the drivers installed.

Click to expand...

Actually Windows can use (read/write/boot) FAT-32 partitions larger than 32Gb, it just can't create them. If he uses his Mac to make the FAT32 partition, it won't be an issue. It's not a FAT limitation, but one that MS built into new versions of Windows to push folks to NTFS.

Read the last few lines of THIS

hey guys, thanks for all the replies. i dl'ed a trial version of macdrive, and i worked perfectly. i got all my music off of my windows boxes, and i have severed the last tie! sweeeeeeet.

now how do i get itunes to play them off of the external hard drive? hmmm, a question for the itunes board i suppose.

again, thanks all!

Just use the, "Add To Library" function in the "File" menu in iTunes. Simply add the whole drive, or folder wherein the music resides. And let iTunes keep it organized.