Problem with external HD going from iMac to pc

I bought a WD passport 160gb and my intention was to use it at work on my imac and at home on my windows xp pc, i thought all was well until i noticed that files that were saved or created on the imac were inaccessible on the pc, AT ALL. They are greyed out in windows it says its a FAT32 drive, what do I do?? I need to be able to access these files.

what type of files are they? are they made with something that a pc cant use?

if the drive is fat32 you should have no problems.

you can also format it NTFS and use paragon on your mac to read and write to ntfs. it works flawlessly and comes in very handy.

.psd, jpg and .doc files, nothing unusual. The psd files were made in cs3 on mac and I have cs3 on the pc, the jpg files were just 'saved' from the net. I think its the drive's fault because as a test i uploaded the images to an ftp then downloaded them on the pc and they worked fine.

if you can save all the files somewhere then:

1. connect the HDD to your pc
2. open my computer and right click on the drive
3. select format and choose fat32 and quick format
4. now try putting files on from the pc then see if it shows up on the mac
5. then try the mac to the pc

it sounds like the disc has some errors. if that doesnt work you could always put it on your mac and use disc utility/erase/and write zero's to it by using like 7 pass. it will take some time but i have actually fixed some old HDD with that.

hope that helps because i can't think out what else it might be.

i have several of those little black passports that i use with mac and pc and they have all worked out of the box.

Do you think formatting it on the mac would work instead?

Hello,
this is my 1st post here and a 1st post about a Apple problem in my life I'm a Windows/Linux user and I WILL buy a MBP as soon as possible ( $$$ ). I have a lot of question about Macs in general and I guess this forum will help me a lot.

Nevertheless, the HFS/NTFS question was one of my 1st. I wanted to know whether OSX has a NTFS read/write support. fletch33 posted a link to this software but isn't there a free solution for NTFS RW ? If possible I'd like to avoid using FAT32.

@qwik3r: I think that it doesn't matter on which OS you format your disk

regards,
Tex.

microsoft invented NTFS and apple didnt pay to support it with read and write. it works perfect with third party software but i do not know of a free version.

to find out what software is available for your new mac for doing anything you should check out the mac section of www.versiontracker.com . if you go there on a pc then it takes you to the windows sections of software so until you get your mac tell it to show you the mac section.

if its not on versiontracker it probably doesnt exist.