networking

ok, i have my mac.

my buddy has windoze peecee's. i can use the internet through his network, but i cant see his computers. which sucks for me, cause i have some 60gb of stuff i need to copy from his to mine, and i'm not doing it with a 1gb flash drive.

already tried formatting my storage drive in windows to an ntfs partition and copied everything over. great
it worked
my mac sees it.
but. my mac. wont. modify it.
i cant add to it. i cant remove things from it.

so i need to reformat it in os x to a usable status. but then windows wont see apple partitions.
so i need to network it.

how do i?

For one, you need to format disks to Fat32 instead of NTFS cause its read/write on both ends. Or you can download NTFS for mac which enables writing onto NTFS. To format the disk using OS X, open disk utility, select your disk, when partitioning, select MS DOS partition...

Secondly, once you are on the network, Click on the desktop to focus on Finder, then his Command+K to bring up the connect to dialog. Enter his IP in this format: smb://xx.xx.xx.xx/ and click connect. It should show the password dialog. Though in most cases, the workgroup should show up on your "Network" tab in Finder window.

Another way is to enable Windows sharing through the mac. System preferences > Sharing > Windows sharing. Then it will show on your PC.

You might also want to see if your friend's software firewall is turned on (control panel => Windows Firewall). If it is, you won't see it unless you have an exclusion set for File/Print Sharing.