Sharing External Harddrive with a PC

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I am about to buy my MBP and have a question for those of you in the know. I have a Seagate External harddrive hooked up to my PCs and wanted to know if you could suggest any software/apps that would allow my MBP to read/write to the Seagate. I know drives are formatted differently for Macs and PCs, but thought I remembered someone mentioning there were ways out there so I could use the same harddrive (formatted for PCs) for both. Any help/suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.

B

PS - I love the forum. The people here are great and always willing to help (unlike some of the PC forums I have been on).
 

eric


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how is the external formatted?

if it's FAT32 (or FAT16) there should be no issue. if it is NTFS, then the mac will be able to read and copy the files, but not modify, delete, or create new files.

i know there is a program for windows pcs to read/write on HFS+, but i'm not sure about one that lets macs read/write on NTFS.
 
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It is formatted NTFS. What I want to do is use the drive for my Time Machine backups and be able to access/modify/add photos and other documents from the harddrive to my MBP and vise versa.
 

eric


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hmm... time machine - i can't say for sure, but i would think you'd need HFS on that drive.

your best bet may be reformatting HFS+ and using something like macdrive on your windows pcs to access the drive.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Mini Core i7 2012 | White 2009 MacBook 2 Ghz | 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver
Go to the macfuse site and download the package for your os

MacFUSE-Core-10.4-1.5.0.dmg
for tiger
MacFUSE-Core-10.5-1.5.1.dmg for leopard

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

additionally download the NTFS support from here

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

this will allow write access to a NTFS drive

just corrected the above to give the right files - thanks eric anyway
 

eric


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nice. v-rep, since i can't give you any more right now. :)
 
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Even though you can make a mac work with an NTFS-formated drive, how does the Time-Machine react to this? Can it still do backups to this drive or is it only accessible under the finder?
 
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MB C2D 2.16, 3gb Ram, 250gb hd, 10.5.3
Paragon NTFS - Reads and writes to NTFS. But as usual, slow in doing so.
 

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