File transfer problems between mac and pc

Help please before this brand new iMac meets an untimely end.

I need to transfer files easily between my iMac at home and my PC (XP) at work. The iMac wouldn't recognise my external HDD so I bought a Seagate GoFlex and configured it to work on the Mac and PC taking pains to deselect the 'Time Machine option'. Nothing I create on the iMac will save on this new drive despite installing the specific driver. No error message - it just puts up a 'prohibited' symbol. PC side of things works fine.

Any assistance very gratefully received!

Is it formatted for NTFS? If so, that's the problem. Reformat to FAT and it'll work just fine. OSX does not natively write NTFS, although it will read it. Or you could go more mobile and use a USB thumb drive also formatted FAT and move it along.

There are third party products that will allow OSX to write to NTFS, but I don't know personally how well they work.

Thanks for the reply.

It is NTFS - on installing the drive, the process had a dialogue box requesting I select either 'Mac Only' or 'Mac and PC' - I selected the latter which stated: "included Paragon NTFS for two-way Mac OS & Windows use".

Not sure I know how to reformat with a 'FAT' system - is this fairly straight forward? I'm guessing I'll lose all the data on the drive if I do this? Happy to do so if it solves the problem.

there's no need to reformat a HDD with a NTFS file system to work in your iMac and lose any files in the process.

i'd suggest you download either of these apps so you can use it both on windows and mac platform:

Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X 9.0

NTFS-3G 2010.10.2

by the way, formatting to FAT32 file system has some restrictions compared to NTFS and Journaled. For example, you cannot transfer a file if you're transferring a single file of more than 4GB to a FAT32 hard disk.

but if you really want to reformat: eHow: How to Format a Hard Drive in Mac OS X

HTH

Many thanks, I'll try the alternative Paragon app you suggest and hope that sorts out the problem. Will post progress here tomorrow.

johndope83 said:

there's no need to reformat a HDD with a NTFS file system to work in your iMac and lose any files in the process.

i'd suggest you download either of these apps so you can use it both on windows and mac platform:

Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X 9.0

NTFS-3G 2010.10.2

by the way, formatting to FAT32 file system has some restrictions compared to NTFS and Journaled. For example, you cannot transfer a file if you're transferring a single file of more than 4GB to a FAT32 hard disk.

but if you really want to reformat: eHow: How to Format a Hard Drive in Mac OS X

HTH

Click to expand...

Very True! A limitation with using NTFS formatted hard disk drives is that you will not be able to copy large files (eg. HD Videos) beyond a certain size cap (4+ GB). And the data transfer rate will be considerably slower than HFS Disks, when using with Mac.


Alternatively, if your Mac is the primary device that you use, you might want to format the external HDD using the native OSX file system (HFS). You can try third-party software to access the external HDD to copy files to and from Windows.

There are many softwares that enable you to use HFS Drives with Windows. The most popular one is MACDRIVE ...but I wouldn't personally recommend it.

You might want to try other software such as Paragon HFS+ and CatacombE HFSexplorer.

My personal recommendation is Catacombe's HFSexplorer.

Good luck!

hellblownjack said:

Thanks for the reply.

It is NTFS - on installing the drive, the process had a dialogue box requesting I select either 'Mac Only' or 'Mac and PC' - I selected the latter which stated: "included Paragon NTFS for two-way Mac OS & Windows use".

Not sure I know how to reformat with a 'FAT' system - is this fairly straight forward? I'm guessing I'll lose all the data on the drive if I do this? Happy to do so if it solves the problem.

Click to expand...

Sounds like Paragon NTFS came bundled with the drive but hasn't installed.