Fat32???

timestoby · Jun 28, 2007

okay so i have some movies on and external ntfs drive that are larger than 4 gigs.macbook will read from the drive but cant write to it.and the drives interally in the macbook are fat32 and you cant have file larger than 4 gigs or something.

even if i did down large 4+ gigs on the macbook and transferred them to the ntfs drive and watchted them would that work.

could use macdrive,but wot is safest thing to do.

dont have macbook yet but will once leopard is out

cwa107 · Jun 28, 2007

timestoby said:
okay so i have some movies on and external ntfs drive that are larger than 4 gigs.macbook will read from the drive but cant write to it.and the drives interally in the macbook are fat32 and you cant have file larger than 4 gigs or something.

even if i did down large 4+ gigs on the macbook and transferred them to the ntfs drive and watchted them would that work.

could use macdrive,but wot is safest thing to do.

dont have macbook yet but will once leopard is out

The MacBook's internal drive will use HFS, not FAT32. Macs can read NTFS formatted volumes, but not write to them. If you need to share data stored on an external drive, it should be formatted FAT32 by the Mac. Windows imposes an artificial 32GB volume size limit.

If you're concerned with single files that are larger than 4GB (the maximum file size for FAT32), there are programs you can install on your PC to read alternative file systems.

Stretch · Jun 28, 2007

Mac drives are formatted as HFS, not FAT32. If you format the drive with the Mac, as FAT32 you'll have no problems with the 4GB file limit.

Edit: CWA beat me

cwa107 · Jun 28, 2007

Stretch said:
Mac drives are formatted as HFS, not FAT32. If you format the drive with the Mac, as FAT32 you'll have no problems with the 4GB file limit.

Edit: CWA beat me

Believe it or not, I just ran into this yesterday. I had forgotten that FAT32 can not store a single file larger than 4GB in size, even if it's formatted by the Mac. I was trying to burn a 6GB file onto a dual-layer disc when I learned that my CD MBP doesn't have a DL optical drive, so I needed to move it over to my PC to burn the disc.

As it turned out, the copy process over to my Mac-formatted FAT32 external hard drive kept failing with a fairly generic-sounding error. It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but the 4GB limit was my problem. I ended up just transferring the file over a network connection.

I do hope Apple addresses NTFS R/W capability with Leopard.

timestoby · Jun 28, 2007

looks like ill have to keep my pc for awhile,well after i get a mac.

Stretch · Jun 28, 2007

cwa107 said:
Believe it or not, I just ran into this yesterday. I had forgotten that FAT32 can not store a single file larger than 4GB in size, even if it's formatted by the Mac. I was trying to burn a 6GB file onto a dual-layer disc when I learned that my CD MBP doesn't have a DL optical drive, so I needed to move it over to my PC to burn the disc.

As it turned out, the copy process over to my Mac-formatted FAT32 external hard drive kept failing with a fairly generic-sounding error. It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but the 4GB limit was my problem. I ended up just transferring the file over a network connection.

I do hope Apple addresses NTFS R/W capability with Leopard.

Really? I've had a few larger files on my FAT32 drive, don't remember if they were over 4GB though. I had always thought, and heard that if a Mac formatted it, it was fine.

Sherman Homan · Jun 28, 2007

I do hope Apple addresses NTFS R/W capability with Leopard.

Me too, but it is Microsoft that is the roadblock, not Apple. Then the google kids rewrote FUSE and NTFS-3G which does provided read write access for OS X.
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

aurora · Jun 29, 2007

do you have to have fink in order for NTFS-3G to work?