I need to kind of network my iMac with a PC laptop BUT in a slightly unusual way.
There are two programs that I need to run but that are only available for the PC. One of them, SADiE, is a professional audio editing application with dedicated hardware that now just uses USB2.0. To keep costs down the idea is to run this on my iMac under Boot Camp as initial tests under Parallels didn't work that well.
The other program is one called EasePublisher (not a commercially available product) that is only available for the PC and requires a USB dongle for activation. This would be installed on a dedicated PC as I need to run both applications at the same time and don't want any problems with slow downs/crashes etc etc.
So far so simple.
The potential tricky part is to do with hard drives.
Basically I will be bringing work home for use on the above systems on a removable drive. This removable drive will have to be formatted as either NTFS (preferred) or FAT32 as this drive has to work with all the PC systems we have at work. When I bring this drive home though it needs to be accessed by both the iMac and the PC laptop at the same time (both read & write).
So questions:
1. Will Windows XP under Boot Camp read/write to NTFS or am I still restricted to FAT32 as under OSX?
2. If I share the drive from either in the iMac or the laptop and network the two computers together will both computers be able to read and write to the drive at the same time or will there be a permissions problem? In the past I have tried sharing an internal drive on one PC and having that PC and another PC write to the drive at the same time but got a permissions problem.
So Windows XP under Boot Camp still can't use NTFS then?
It can. I just installed XP Pro last night and partitioned 20gb to the NTFS file system on my macbook pro.
Edit: If you haven't set it up already, it works something like this:
You use the boot camp assisstant to tell it how much you want to partition to be, then you reboot into the windows install screen, and from there you have all the choices that you would during a regular install. Just choose the partition you made and it will tell you it's unformatted or formatted in an uncompatible file system and will ask you how you want it formatted.
That's okay, this drive will only ever be used for PC work.
Thanks to Village Idiot for the guide, very useful.
So that just leaves the permissions thing.
Can I share a drive off of one computer and have both computers access it at the same time or would I be better off going with a NAS drive.
You could. With XP installed on a mac, it's an xp installation. It's not xp emulated or xp lite, it's XP. There's not going to be anything different in the way the os works because it's on the mac.
That being said, I'd choose an NAS or server for storage as that way one computer is not completely dependant on the other for certain information. It's just me, but I'd like to only have to turn one computer on when I wanted certain data instead of two....and then worrying about something going wrong with either....
Just make sure it's all backed up if it's important information.
Edit again: Just make sure you download DirectX. It's not included in the XP install and doesn't come on the mac drivers. You may run across some programs that require this.
Cheers mate, much appreciated. Just seen the price of a couple of suitable NAS drives and they are so cheap it would be stupid not to go down that route.
