Share USB FAT32 Hard Disk on my local net

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Hi, I've bought a USB 2.0 Hard Disk and I formatted it with FAT32 to use it both with OSX and windows.
Now I would like to make it readable and writable on my local lan but when I connect from another computer to my share it shows only the local drives and not the external one. Is there a way to share the volume?

I tried with a third party program called sharepoints that shares chosen folders on the system but the drive remains invisible.

What can i do? Thanks
 
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G'day LuciusHunt & welcome to Mac-Forums.

You need to set the External HD up for sharing just as you have set the computers, so ... if the ext HD is connected to the PC, you need to enable sharing for it and if it's connected to the Mac ... the same goes.

You then mount the ext HD just as you mount your other shares.
 
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Well, the problem is that if I connect it to the pc with Vista and share it, the other Mac can have access to it.

But if I connect it to the iMac I can only see the osx disk and my HOME folder as sharable volumes.
I'm not too expert and maybe I don't know how to enable a shared place. Can you help me in the procedure? Where do I have to go?
I went in the control panel and enabled the sharing features but there are no options to chose what to share. Am I wrong? What's my mistake?

Thanks for the help and for the welcome.
 
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Does the drive show up in disc utility?

You may need to reformat the drive on your Mac to MS DOS (Fat32 in mac speak) and then see if the drive shows up.
 
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It shows correctly, I think. It's formatted with MS-DOS.
I really don't understand. Thanks anyway! Any other hint?
 
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Sorry to confuse you LuciusHunt, i meant that the ext HD should show up in the left pane of Disc Utility when mounted. Could you please confirm that it does.

I also wondered if you originally formatted the ext HD on a PC and was suggesting that you reformat it but do so from your Mac. Go to Disc Utility and format it as MS DOS (on Windows this is called FAT32).

Another thing you could try if the ext HD has a FireWire connection, is to connect to it from the Mac using FireWire.

If you try the FireWire method and still can't see it, try the SharePoints app again to set up sharing for the ext HD.
 
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First of all, I really appreciate your help!

Unfortunately I don't have the firewire connection.
For what regards the USB connection I would like to know if it is possible that osx CANNOT share a fat32 drive.

If you are absolutely sure that it can do this I can go on with the tryouts. ;)
I ask you that because SharePoints tells me that it's not able to share FAT32 external volumes...

Last thing: the volume mounts correctly and I can see it in disk utility. It was formatted with this tool.
 
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I read in the below link that it's best to format the drive in Mac OS Extended format if it's constantly attached to the Mac. Do you need to connect it to the PC ever? Or just sharing it over the network?

Check out this.
 

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