Hi all, I have a G5 tower running 10.7.5 and have been experiencing problems when formatting swappable HD's for both my mac and PC. I've been archiving video files on numerous drives. I "had" been formatting the "new" drives with the the disk utility; single partitions, GUID & ExFat. I was getting artifacts and truncated files when going to the PC. I read on another forum to change to: Master Boot Record instead of GUID. Since I have been doing this, on startup my G5 is telling me these drives are not readable and need to be initialized. This has been a random occurrence. So, its not every drive, every time. I never know which drive will show up as not readable. And once its not readable on the Mac it isn't on the PC at that point either!
My question: What is the reason that I'm now getting this message? Is anything retrievable on these drives once they are supposedly needing to be initialized? Should there be 2 partitions? One for the boot record and another free space? Is there a better, more reliable method of formatting for use on both platforms w/o problems or conflicts? It doesn't seem to be affecting the drives formatted w/ GUID and one partition. But I'm at a standstill on what to do with the several drives I formatted with the MBR option.
This is very frustrating because, I didn't see this problem coming and lot of my data is being lost, and I will have to re-digitize several hours worth of video again!
Thanks for any help you can offer! Ron
My question: What is the reason that I'm now getting this message? Is anything retrievable on these drives once they are supposedly needing to be initialized? Should there be 2 partitions? One for the boot record and another free space? Is there a better, more reliable method of formatting for use on both platforms w/o problems or conflicts? It doesn't seem to be affecting the drives formatted w/ GUID and one partition. But I'm at a standstill on what to do with the several drives I formatted with the MBR option.
This is very frustrating because, I didn't see this problem coming and lot of my data is being lost, and I will have to re-digitize several hours worth of video again!
Thanks for any help you can offer! Ron