External hard drive questions

breakneck

hey everyone i'm running into some issues with my external hard drive i just bought. Its a Seagate 500 gb freeagent pro series. I use both mac and pc, but this hard drive is set up only for pc use when it comes to read/write abilities. On the mac i can only read. Is there any way to change this?
I've been screwing around with it and I formatted the drive on the mac and got it to work, then i brought it home to my pc and now my computer can't regonize the drive as a hard drive. Tomorrow i'm going to try to reformat back to pc and start over again.
What i'm getting at is i'm wondering if there is a way to make this external hard drive work on both a mac and a pc? My other external, a firelite 60gb, seems to have no problem with the cross over between computers but i don't really want to rely on carrying around 2 hard drives all the time. I've never had a problem like this and i don't know where to go. any input would be cool. thanks

Illusions

Format for FAT32 I believe. Windows likes formating in NTFS (which is read only on a Mac), and Mac likes formating in its own file format, which Windows doesn't recognize. The only problem you'll have with FAT32, is that if you constantly write to, and erase from the drive it will start to slow down (I've had mine 5 years, with moderate use, no apparent slowdown). Other than that, google "fat32format.exe" because Windows XP, I think, will only format the drive to appear as 32 gig (because Windows XP is bugged...but really its a "feature" in this instance). Await other replies though, because I'm not entirely 100% sure.

Sage

Microsoft made it so XP pro and Win 2000 can't write fat 32 that big on grounds that ntfs is a better file system, it's not a bug it was intentional. I hate you Microsoft and Apple! You can always get a windows program that that allows you to view Mac files. I had one when I used to do work on Macs and PCs and had to transfer files from one to another. The catch with using that software is that Macs don't use extensions so you must write these so they work on windows when you save. So if you wanted photoshop to read a file created on your pc you would have to make sure it had the .psd extension which windoes writes but macs don't when you saved. And for Macs to know what created when you bring it in you have to write the extension back in case it took it out. This may have changed with the new Mac OS before OS X. That said it's probably better to just get a program like Partition magic to format your drive as fat 32 just make sure you have your latest service packs on or you might find that your drive has failed at some point in the future. You can also format the drive with DOS so if you know the commands and have say a norton antivirus cd it will let you boot in dos mode and maybe you can do fdisk on it. You'll need a windows 98, 95, any windows home edition boot disk since I believe they still let you go to dos and format things. I stopped using any Home edition of windows after Windows 98, NT was so much better and stable. I like partition Magic though and it lets you do shit easily enough.

Alex

breakneck

thanks for the help guys. yea i'm going to try to format into fat 32. hopefully i can do that on the mac, if not may i'll try partition magic.

Sage: i still remember my good old dos commands so maybe i'll try to put dos onto the drive. I'll update with any progress (hopefully).

**edit** while using partition magic it will only allow me to format the drive in NTFS, Linux Ext2 or Linux Ext3. My other drives have the FAT32 option .. .anyways i'm giving it a try now

***edit*** --> nope, partition magic didn't work. I got some error when in reboot to partition into NTFS. I'll try to fix it over on a mac, i'm headin that way now.

Ryan Clark

A couple of drivers exist for NTFS writing in OSX:

There is the free (and somewhat complicated-looking) MacFuse.

There is also the commercial ($30) Paragon NTFS.

cheers,

-Ryan

Sage

I think that's what I used to use.

Alex

breakneck

Per: what do you mean i'll run into trouble with file size?
i've looked into the MacDrive and i'm thinking about it but i'm not really on macs so much as i'm on the pc. Does that matter?

anyways, for now i've gone back to the mac, reformated to ms-dos able with is FAT 32, but if its not my best choice i'll change it. Additional imput would be very helpful

breakneck

i'm too poor/busy to own a 360

Ryan Clark

The only time I've had trouble with FAT32's file size limit was when editing large uncompressed video files.