drive access

Brand new mac user here, just brought home a new G5 today and having a lot of fun with it. I was under the impression that the mac could read a fat formatted hard drive, is this the case or not. I have an external hard drive that I have a lot of files on I was hoping to be able to transfer over. The files were all transfered from a windows machine running Xp.

It is a usb external fat formatted and when i plug it into a usb port on the front of the G5 a box comes up saying something about I have plugged in a drive it can't read and then goes away leaving me no way to see or get the files... Am i doing something wrong or won't the mac read a fat formated drive?

Thanks for any help...

The Mac can read and write FAT32, and read NTFS. I'm not sure if it can read FAT16, as I never tried, but the last Windows using FAT16 was Win95, Win98 used FAT32.
So if yourMac can't read the drive, there's something else wrong, I guess

Avalon said:

The Mac can read and write FAT32, and read NTFS. I'm not sure if it can read FAT16, as I never tried, but the last Windows using FAT16 was Win95, Win98 used FAT32.
So if yourMac can't read the drive, there's something else wrong, I guess

Click to expand...

Thanks for letting me know. I was sure i had heard it could do fat32, but I've only been a mac user for a couple of hours and wasn't sure. The drive is formatted in fat32 so evidently there is another problem here. Possibly the drive has gone out... can you blame it after 4 years under windows....(G)

This G5 is great, the more I use it the better I like it.

Solved

Ok, I've been using the Mac for 4 days now so I am now a Mac Pro....(G)

Figured out what the problem was with the Mac not reading my Fat 32 external hard drive... The drive didn't have a volume name so Mac won't read it... Gave the drive a 5 letter volume name and presto all of a sudden there was an icon on the screen for that drive and I was able to retrieve all the files I wanted.

Day 4 and lovin it !!