Shared External Hard Drive - XP/OSX

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Hi All

"Five weeks with my iMac and loving it"

I have a Toshiba ext hard drive that I used to use on my windows computer for storing video files while editing. I have this connected to my iMac at the moment but can only read from this....which I understand why.
I would like to use this drive as my itunes library as I have a lot of CD's and don't want to use up the iMacs drive with MP3's. Thing is, I still wish to use this drive when I boot up in windows, to use my video editor.
As I cannot yet afford final cut, I still need to use my Magix Pro 10 editor which is windows only programme, so I need some way of sharing this drive with both OS.

Is this possible, and can someone tell me how to go about this.

As soon as I get Final Cut, I will dump the windows install and be solely OSX, as I only use XP for this one programme.

I have not missed windows one bit, which was one of my main fears of changing to Apple.......so for anyone else out there who is still debating whether to change or not....Just Do It.
 
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The drive is formatted to NTFS. It needs to be in FAT32 in order for XP and OS X to read/write from the drive.

To do this, you'll have to dump all of it's contents onto one of the computers to back it up, open Disk Utility (apps/utilities) and select the drive. Click the "Erase" button and choose "MSDOS" as the schema before you erase the drive.

After it erases, drag and drop the files back onto it, then it should work with both OS's.

FAT32 doesn't allow single files over 4GB, however, so be careful that you're adhering to this limitation before you do this.
 
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There are two other options you may wish to consider:

1/ Format the drive as HFS+ (the Mac standard format) and then buy MacDrive, a piece of Windows shareware that allows Windows to seamlessly support HFS+. This gives you the best of both worlds, albiet at a small fee.

2/ Format the drive in a format that both share. FAT32 is the easiest choice, but it does not support files larger than 4GB *and* it does not support the Mac/unix/Linux concept of file ownership and permissions. A common file system to both is Linux's stalwart ext2, which fully supports file ownership and permissions. Neither Windows nor Mac OS X supports ext2 "out of the box", but freeware support is available for both.

For Windows, see: http://www.fs-driver.org

For Mac, see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx

I have used the Windows support and can vouch for it. I have not yet used the Mac support, but have read good things about it.
 
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Thanks surfwax95 for the advice.

The 4Gb limit is going to be too restrictive for video, as one mini dv cassette holds 13GB of AVI per 1 hour of film. I need to work with AVI in the first instance to preserve quality.

Thanks for the advice though..at least i now know what I can & cannot do.

Philip
 
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Thanks mac57.

Formatting the drive as HFS+ seems the best route for me. Thanks also for the links.

Philip
 
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You could always partition the drive into the different file systems/formats too :D
 
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Kyomii...Thanks for that.
Having never partitioned a drive before, how would I do that? Its a 320g drive so I could split it half & half.

Cheers

Philip
 
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Kyomii...Thanks for that.
Having never partitioned a drive before, how would I do that? Its a 320g drive so I could split it half & half.

Cheers

Philip

Hi Philip, looking around on the net, if you want HFS+ along with NTFS/FAT32 it doesn't appear to be an easy solution. Normally you would make your paritions and format as per se, but there seems to be some problems with formating in different file systems.

Maybe if there is someone on here who has done it, they can advise you - otherwise I would suggest staying with your original intentions :)

Sorry about that. :(
 

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