External Hard Drive Questions

I have had a 200GB external HDD for some time now, I had only used it originally for my intel macbook. Recently though I started being able to work from home and had to break out my old windows xp box from the closet. I have the HDD formatted at Mac OS X journaled and it isn't visible to Windows XP, also if I format it to FAT32 I tried to copy a 6GB file to it and it wouldn't allow it. Is there another way to format this drive that will allow it to work with both machines? I'd really like to learn. Thanks!

Also if there is more information you would need to know to try and troubleshoot this for me just ask. Thanks

-Ping

You can do one of two things. Either format it as NTFS and install MacFUSE to allow your Mac to read and write to it, or format it as HFS+ and install MacDrive to let Windows write to it.

The first idea is best as it's the method that won't cost you any money ;P

haha thanks I will give those a try. It was never an issue I ever thought of before until I was given the privelage of working from home. It just sucks that all of the systems we use don't have mac equivelants since they are mostly proprietary systems Oh well. Thanks for the help and I will let you know how it works out for me

-Ping

Or you can use MacDrive on a PC to read Mac formatted drives :

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

the macFUSE didn't work for me, I installed it on my macbook and when I connected my NTFS formatted drive it wouldn't allow me to write to it. I made sure that the drive was set for read and write and it was. I installed macdrive on my pc and that worked great at reading a mac formatted drive. Only thing is it isn't free, it is only a trial version and I can't justify the 50 bucks right now... Poor me lol. Oh well, I guess I might have to just convince the treasury department (wife) to allow the expenditure, lol. Any more ideas? Keep em coming.

-Ping

I didn't know I also had to install NTFS-3G to get it working, but now transferring data to the ext drive takes FOREVER. 60GB took somewhere around 12 hours whereas when it was formatted to Mac Journalled took about an hour. Is this typical? Thanks

-Ping