What file system is suitable for both Windows & Mac OS?

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Apologies if this question has cropped up before as I'm sure it has. I'm new to Macs, but have a lot of experience repairing PC's I need to recover a customers iTunes from a failing hard drive and copy them to a USB hard drive for use on both a Mac & a Windows XP based system. Can anyone tell me what file structure I should format the removable drive with that will enable me to access it from both OS's?

Alternatively, if there are no common file structures, are there any utilities (free is possible) that allow the Mac to read a USB drive with either Fat32 or NTFS file structure or a PC to read a mac file structure (vice versa)?

Thanks for any help provided.

Regards, Al.
 
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Format the USB drive with FAT32 and you'll be able to natively read & write on windows and OSX.
Format with NTFS and you'll be able to read/write in windows and read only in OSX

It's possible to use 3rd party drivers to write to NTFS from OSX but that seem overkill for what you need to do.

HTH
mrplow
 
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Since the NTFS file system is the superior form for Windows, is there any possibility anytime that MAC will upgrade its OS so that it can natively read/write to an external drive formatted NTFS? Sure would be nice.

kcstieg
 
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I highly doubt you will see native NTFS write from OS X. There are third party applications that allow this though.
 

cwa107


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Since the NTFS file system is the superior form for Windows, is there any possibility anytime that MAC will upgrade its OS so that it can natively read/write to an external drive formatted NTFS? Sure would be nice.

kcstieg

Check out Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X. Works like a charm and is plug-and-play unlike MacFUSE.

Oh, and Apple makes Macs. MAC is an acronym for Machine Access Control, one of the sublayers of Data Link Layer in the OSI model. ;P
 
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Oh, and Apple makes Macs. MAC is an acronym for Machine Access Control, one of the sublayers of Data Link Layer in the OSI model.

People want to write "MAC" a lot. Not really sure why, maybe because you usually capitalize PC when you write it, even though you never see Mac written as MAC anywhere. I'm not really interested in getting into a debate over it, because I've seen some heated discussions over the matter. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out they usually mean Mac. It's only slightly annoying because MAC actually means something.
 
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MAC has lots of different meanings. here are some more

MAC Times - Modified access created (in computer forensic terms)
MAC address (media access controle)
 

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