help needed, how to create network for mac and pc

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studio68


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here's the long story: I'm a professional photographer that has just made the leap over to mac this week.

Here is the problem: I have a existing gigabit network system which utilises two 2Tb Western digital My World II (Raid 1 network drives) which is my working photo storage.

The network was run by PC's using XP and Vista. I now have two new iMacs which replace two pc's. But here is the catch, I still have a powerful laptop which I need to use on the network.

I would like to re-formatt the drives to use Apple's HFS file system, but now how do I get access to files and sharing with my Windows based laptop?????

Help please, I live in a small town in Africa and there is just about no experienced help with mac for at least 200 miles.

:Grimmace:
 
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ticedoff8


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studio68 said:
here's the long story: I'm a professional photographer that has just made the leap over to mac this week.

Here is the problem: I have a existing gigabit network system which utilises two 2Tb Western digital My World II (Raid 1 network drives) which is my working photo storage.

The network was run by PC's using XP and Vista. I now have two new iMacs which replace two pc's. But here is the catch, I still have a powerful laptop which I need to use on the network.

I would like to re-formatt the drives to use Apple's HFS file system, but now how do I get access to files and sharing with my Windows based laptop?????

Help please, I live in a small town in Africa and there is just about no experienced help with mac for at least 200 miles.

:Grimmace:
Click to expand...
You don't reformat the networked drives.
A network drive is basically a very simple computer sharing it's hard drive - they call them Network Attached Storage (NAS). Typically, they run a simple Linux OS and share their HD via SAMBA (Windows shares).

Sharing them through the network via Windows shares is your best, simplest solution. The Mac & PC will be happy. The Mac will create files on the network with all of the necessary file information it needs to support your applications, and the PC will still have full access.

If you wanted to take it one step further - share some folders from your PC and mount them to the Mac. Once you understand network sharing, you have a lot of flexibility.
 
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studio68


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Do you know if the Western Digital 'My World' Edition II drives run NAS or are they NTFS preformatted?

If they run NAS as you mentioned I will be very relieved. Changing to Mac is not a small leap as most would thing. Hundreds of $$$$ on new software is a huge problem.
 

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