External hard drive

W

whoriental

Guest
I switched about a month and a half ago. My pc has turned into my own personal radio station and for that purpose only since i have gotten my powerbook. I want to put all of the music on a external hard drive i just bought and be able to use it on both windows and my mac. I ran into problems when trying to do this with my iPod, it being either mac formatted or pc formatted, I was wondering if I am going to run into the same types of problems. Its just now I have about 6000 songs on my pc that I would like to take with me on the road, and I have about 1000 songs on the mac, and I would like to find someway to merge the two so that I can take them with me and then come back home, plug it into my pc and listen to it there.
 
OP
K

KuruMonkey

Guest
This is quite straightforward.

Take your disk and format it on the PC, making sure to use FAT32 (not, repeat, not NTFS).

Put your files on it, and the mac will read and write fine. It will leave .trashes folder and another file i forget the name of on the disk; just leave them be. I use USB drives between PCs at work and Macs at home all the time now, no problems at all. (well, except when the PC decides to knacker the drive, but thats a seperate issue!)

Formatting for Mac leaves the disk unusable by windows as far as I know.
 
James

James


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KuruMonkey said:
Formatting for Mac leaves the disk unusable by windows as far as I know.
Click to expand...

This isn't quite true, while it is true that the pc doesn't read the Mac format on its own, by using the program MacDrive on the pc, it can then read the Mac formated drive.

And if you want, the Mac can format the drive in fat32 for you by using the disk utility built into OS X.
 
OP
W

whoriental

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So how do I format it using windows, I have never had to format anything. Also, will i still be able to play my music directly from the hard drive on both the pc and mac.
 
OP
W

whoriental

Guest
ok so I have no idea how to format or make my pc see my external hard drive, i know that this is a mac forums but how do i do that. That would be there first step to making it work
 
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E

este

Guest
First and foremost backup al of the music on your external drive, if you format it without backing up you WILL LOOSE all your DATA and MUSIC files!!

By formatting yor basically getting a clean slate1, I would adivse you to format it using fat32 as it by far the easiest way to have the drive work on both Mac and PC, there are other ways but this is by far the simplest. IMO

How are you connecting the external drive to the pc? USB firewire?
once your pc sees the external drive click on my computer, find the removable drive o the external drive, rightclick, and select format select either full or quick format (I cant remember which is better) and select FAT 32 from the format option drop down menu. Also, make sure you format the correct drive and not your c: drive lol.

as far as you pc not seeing your drive? some external drives come with software that needs to be installed, while I have ye to instal anything like that if you cant see the drive you shoud give the installation cd a try.

hope this helps.
 
scooter

scooter


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este said:
First and foremost backup al of the music on your external drive, if you format it without backing up you WILL LOOSE all your DATA and MUSIC files!!

By formatting yor basically getting a clean slate1, I would adivse you to format it using fat32 as it by far the easiest way to have the drive work on both Mac and PC, there are other ways but this is by far the simplest. IMO

How are you connecting the external drive to the pc? USB firewire?
once your pc sees the external drive click on my computer, find the removable drive o the external drive, rightclick, and select format select either full or quick format (I cant remember which is better) and select FAT 32 from the format option drop down menu. Also, make sure you format the correct drive and not your c: drive lol.

as far as you pc not seeing your drive? some external drives come with software that needs to be installed, while I have ye to instal anything like that if you cant see the drive you shoud give the installation cd a try.

hope this helps.
Click to expand...
a quick Windows format just removes the file headers but leaves the data files, whereas a full will totally erase whatever is on the HD.

if you want it to be a clean drive, I would recommend a full format; but backup whatever is on there first
 

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