External Hard Drive Mac-XP Crossover

I got this portable harddrive I use. It's the harddrive from one of my destroyed laptops. It's NTSC formatted. In a bizarre series of disasters, I lost both my laptops and my desktop PC and now just have this Mac. It's running Panther and it can read the drive and I can use everything on it, but I can't actually change, modify, or add to the drive. I'm something of a writer and this is sort of distressing cause at present, I have no means of getting the files from my Mac to it. I mean, there's means, but not day to day convenient means. I often use various computers depending on where i'm at, so it's nice just to have the travel drive. Is there any way around this problem or what? Is it just a NTSC-FAT problem? Also, is there a MAC word processor program that saves in the same format that a PC word program does? Cause i'm having a hrad time getting anything to open one way or the other unless it's a basic RTF file.

EddieSteel said:

Also, is there a MAC word processor program that saves in the same format that a PC word program does?

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I used an open source word processor software but it cannot open MS Office documents I have created using PCs. So to solve the problem I bought the Microsoft Office for Macinstosh. This makes me open and save files in either Mac or PC.

I believe the disk in question is formated as ntfs. Which Apple can only read, and not write too. You will need to format the drive as fat32 to write to is from an Apple system as my understanding. Some will hopefully come along and correct me if I am wrong.

If I format the drive to FAT, can I still read and write to it with my PC, or is it basically one or the other? Also, that drive is hard split into two partitions. Can one be FAT and the other NTFC?

EddieSteel said:

...it can read the drive and I can use everything on it, but I can't actually change, modify, or add to the drive. I'm something of a writer and this is sort of distressing cause at present, I have no means of getting the files from my Mac to it. I mean, there's means, but not day to day convenient means. I often use various computers depending on where i'm at, so it's nice just to have the travel drive....

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NTFS is the name of your file system. If you want your Mac to be able to write to the disk, it must be formatted as FAT32 (I assume you are using the drive with Windows computers also).
There exist threads on this forum about which software suites people prefer.

EddieSteel said:

If I format the drive to FAT, can I still read and write to it with my PC, or is it basically one or the other? Also, that drive is hard split into two partitions. Can one be FAT and the other NTFC?

Click to expand...

FAT32 is an older PC file system. Both Mac and PC can read and write to FAT32. You can have different file formats on different partitions, but the only benefit I could see for keeping NTFS around is if you need to store some VERY large files (>4 GB). FAT32 cannot write a file larger than this.

Update: Just saw this thread regarding a beta enabling NTFS writes by Mac(?)
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=498177#post498177

As already stated, the file system is NTFS. NTSC is the analog broadcast signal used by TV stations here in the U.S and elsewhere.

Go to the link in the above post by Neo - grab the beta 2 version (look for post #36). There are several of us using this software and having no issues with either reading nor writing to NTFS volumes. This is the easy way without having to reformat your drive.

Well that sucked....

I installed the beta 2 job and now the computer doesn't recognize the external harddrive at all. I uninstalled it, but it didn't make a difference.

Well, I downloaded something called IOUSB Family after punching MAC USB into a search engine and it seems to have done the trick, at least put me back where I was before. I'm just going to toss some things around and turn that drive into a FAT drive and be done with it. Thanks for the help and info on that. Now i'm gonna tackle that word processor problem...

File Formats:
NTFS- Use if you're only using with Windows O/S (Mac will only READ this format, wont allow you to write to it)

Mac Journaled- If you're only using on Mac

FAT32 - Use if you plan on crossing over

As for Word, Microsoft Word on MAC will open with Microsoft Word on Windows, they're completely compatible.