MS formatted Hard Drive with containing iTunes

I plugged my 120Gb external hard Drive into my Mac and it reads all the AAC iTunes files ok. However, it appears that I can't write to this external hard drive.

Is that the rule? You can read a MS formatted HD but not write to it?

I may get another hard drive and formatte it with my Mac and then transfer the 6000 songs over. My girlfriend can have this drive for her MS laptop. That should work shouldn't it?

Tc

NTFS formatted drives are read only on the Mac. Fat32 can be mounted read/write though.

Kokopelli said:

NTFS formatted drives are read only on the Mac. Fat32 can be mounted read/write though.

Click to expand...

So when i get my new external HD shall I formate it with Fat32 (if its possible). Thats means I can read/write with both Windows and Apple?


Tc

TangoCharlie said:

So when i get my new external HD shall I formate it with Fat32 (if its possible). Thats means I can read/write with both Windows and Apple?

Click to expand...

Yes, but if I remember correctly Microsoft will only allow users to format FAT32 filesystems to NTFS filesystems and not the other way around. You'll have to buy a program called PartitionMagic to get NTFS volumes back to FAT volumes.

You can convert from FAT32 > NTFS with data still on the drive, if the drive is empty or you don't mind it getting erased you can format it to whatever you want no matter what it currently is.

You can convert from FAT32 > NTFS with data still on the drive, if the drive is empty or you don't mind it getting erased you can format it to whatever you want no matter what it currently is.

TangoCharlie said:

So when i get my new external HD shall I formate it with Fat32 (if its possible). Thats means I can read/write with both Windows and Apple?


Tc

Click to expand...

If i remember correctly the Mac itself will format the new drive in fat32 using the disk utility in the utilities folder. You have to format the whole drive though, you can't partition it. Then both the pc and the Mac can both read and write to the drive.

There is a limit to the size of the partition you can create with FAT32 - it being 32GB!

Not quite sure how this works with the MAC formatting the partition to FAT32. I may be really sad and try it myself on my external HD.

meatychi said:

There is a limit to the size of the partition you can create with FAT32 - it being 32GB!

Click to expand...

Not true, 32 refers to the number of bits used for addressing, a FAT32 partition can actually go higher than any modern hard drive can go.