01-14-2007, 01:50 PM

I have a small(for right now its small) problem. I have an external HD formatted for windows, with all of my files on it. I was wondering if there is a way to get some of my files (mostly music, videos and pictures) onto my mac. Thanks again for any help ~Tyler

01-14-2007, 01:51 PM

This actually isn't a problem. The drive is either FAT32 or NTFS. No matter what, Mac OS X can read it. Just plug it into your Mac and copy your files off!

01-14-2007, 06:28 PM

if you are going to be switching back and forth between windows and mac with the same hard drive you will want to format the external to FAT32 which is simple. once you get the information off of it you can just format on a mac and i think the default is fat32 or with windows xp you will need a 3rd party program like swissknife or something(use google).

01-15-2007, 04:14 PM

Bear in mind if you do this that FAT32 does not support file ownership or permission attributes and so you lose all this if you transfer files back and forth. It also doesn't support forked files, so I understand that you *can* lose information if your Mac file uses a resource fork. I am very definitely not the expert in this area, but I understand that Macs store a lot of info in these resource forks.

There is one file format that will work for both Windows and Mac, and which supports ownership and permission attributes. That is the old Linux stalwart, ext2.

See the following for the Windows driver:

http://www.fs-driver.org/

and the following for the Mac support:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/

As an added bonus, the resultant disk will be readable by Linux systems too!