Sharing External HardDisk with PC's and Mac's
 

:confused:
I am trying to have one hard disk for both my new iBook G4 and for all Windows machines.

I have read many responses to this problem and really have not gotten a clear answer.

Originally the drive had two partions on it. One that was in Fat32 and one that was NTFS. I knew that the partition in NTFS was no readable by a Mac, so I used Partition Magic on my PC to format it to Fat32 and then had it lumped up into one partition. I also took out all the folder icons that Windows XP uses just in case that was causing my problem.

Originally, before the format and resizing, what would happen is that my mac would freeze when trying to access the primary partition. So, I performed the above steps.

Now, I can get to the files. I can open a excel file, word file, pdf file all without any problems. When I go to access any .mp3, and .jpeg the machine freezes and has to be manually turned off.

I also cant copy any files to the local drive without it having it freeze up on me.

A couple of questions
A) Has anyone ever successfully used an external USB drive to share file for Windows and for a Mac.
B) What casued the complete lock up my system when trying to read the drive when it had the NTFS partion on it and the XP Folder Icons.

I have successfully done what you are trying to do - I had a USB/Firewire combo enclosure that I put a hard drive in and formatted it using Disk Utility as MS-DOS (FAT32). I have no problem using the Firewire connection for the mac and USB 2.0 for the PC.

As far as NTFS, your mac should be able to see and read any NTFS partition, just not write to it. You should be able to read and write to FAT32 drives and Disk Utility can even repair FAT32 if necessary.

Instead of using Partition Magic to format FAT32, have you tried any other utilities? (Disk Manager in XP, Disk Utility in OS X, etc.)

FAT32 also has some formatting limitations when done on a PC using windows- what size drive is it?

The drive is a 40GB drive. I am currently backing up the drive onto a pc and then will format it with the disk utility on the mac. What I cant understand is why this does not work vise versa. Formatting the drive in Windows and then reading it on the Mac should work.

According to this article, formatting the drive from XP will only give you 32GB of space - however using another OS to format it will bypass this limitation.

Perhaps something in the formatting didn't quite "catch" when you did it last time?

Still not working with 18.6 GB
 

I backed up all the files to a PC. Then on the PC I took the hard disk and split it into two seperate 18.6GB drives. I formated them on the PC and hoped all should work.

I copied an .mp3 to the first partition and then plugged it into my iBook. Well it locked up trying to read the file.

iTunes returned an error saying that the location of the file has changed. So I attempted to search for it and it locked up. Now the dam Mac wont mount the drives at all.

It also wont allow me to format the drives in MS-DOS mode as it would before (The drive briefly mounted, so I went into disk utility)

I dont think that this is possible. This is also very fustrating. It sounds like Winblows and Macanshit. I dont think anyone can make an OS that works.

Problem only with mp3's and video files only
 

Now it has a problem with video and mp3 files. It locks up reading and copying them. No problem with small docs, excel files and pdf files. Can anyone help.

Also, why cant I use the mac to format the drive in Fat now when before i could. I was hoping that this might be the problem but now it wont let me do it.

Please HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Using Disk Utility you should click on the external hard drive device in the left column on top and not the two partitions that you made - that should enable you to reformat it.

It will unmount automatically if its being reformatted and no files are open from it.

But I dont wont to reformat the entire drive again. Just one of the partitions. I already returned the files to partition 1.

What is the command and how do I get into the unix os. I know that it is fdisk. How does this work in a Mac?

Need Help with Formatting
 

Can somebody please tell me how the formatting works in a Mac. I need to know if the problem that I have is because I am formatting the drive with Windows. Also can please tell me if I hightlight the drive itself in the disk utility will it format the entire drive or will it from there just ask which partition I am looking to format.

Disk Utility will require that the entire drive be formated in order to modify the partition table. You might consider looking into the utility, iPartition that will allow you to dynamically adjust the partitions, frequently without defragmenting or formating.

I have the same problem
 

I have two external drives. An USB and a firewire/USB combo.
The USB doesn't seem to work on my Mac (G4-400), and on the firewire combo I have some strange effects.
I have two partitions on it: One little NTFS and one big FAT32 (The limit of 32GB someone mentioned is a bug in the WindowsXP graphical disk administration)
One the first night, the Mac recognised both partitions and I was able to access my mediafiles. But after a nights sleep he only want to communicate with my NTFS partition and is ignoring my FAT32. On the Intel-PC I can access all files and there is no damage... I don't know whats going on....

Frustrated!
 

I am sharing the same frustration as XPNSTOS77. I own an 80GB USB 2.0 external disk and tried to format it for the usage of both MAC and PC. As according to the advice from many of the MAC forums, I've used Partition Manager from the PC and partition it to one single large FAT32. Works well naturally with my PC but on plugging into my iMAC G4 with panther, it says the volume is unreadable and ask me to either eject, ignore or initialize it.

Am just wondering why this is the case. When i plug in an SD card on a USB Hub or a ZIP drive... it works without any issues. My iMAC can recognized those instantly. I would presume that my USB external disk drive would be the same. None of the forums can clearly tell me why. Is it because it cannot recognize a 2.5" drive on an external USB device? Is it because Panther lacks a driver for mass storage?

It is absolutely imperative that i get the drive to work for both my notebook PC and iMac. Please help.

Try formatting the drive using Disk Utility and use the MS-DOS option for the filesystem

I have tried to use the disk utility. It doesn't seem to let me format, erase or partition it. It recognizes the disk though as i can do a 'get info' and even 'eject' it. When I do a 'diskutil list' in command line, it says that there is a /dev/disk1 but has a size of *0G. I've tried to use both fdisk and diskutil to partition and format it but comes back with an error to say that it cannot do so. I must have tried all the methods as advised on other forums. None of it seemed to work. Any ideas? I do not think its the external HD USB casing problem because it works perfectly fine with my PC (and it did say its compatible to Mac OS). Is there something that i missed out?

i am having the same problems as described here. G4 1 GHz powerbook. seagate 200 Gb external hd. enermax USB 2.0 enclosure. How unbelievable that my 4 year old, windows ME Dell is the only functioning piece in this puzzle.

has anybody discovered anything new since the last post a couple of months ago??

Same problem; no answers. G3 600 GHz iBook, 3 different USB 2.0 external drives. The one formatted in XP showed up on my Mac and had all the problems above. The Mac didn't even find the 2 unformatted disks so, I couldn't try formatting them. I'm new to Windows and had no problem. Started with Apple II, had a Mac II when they cost $7000... This has me stumped. :(

Part of your problem is that your Mac does not have USB 2.0! The USB ports on your G3/600MHz are USB 1.1. This just isn't fast enough for practical use of external hard disk drives. You should limit yourself to Firewire compatible drives.

Actually it's not a bug, it's a feature. Windows XP was designed to limit the size you can format a FAT32 partition to 32GB because, for larger drives, the minimum size allocated to a file goes up dramatically, e.g., a file with a single character might take up 32MB. The NTFS file system has much better allocation of disk resources and MS was trying to encourage the use of NTFS instead of FAT32 for large drives, hence the self imposed limit.

Just an idea
 

Hello,

I'm not an Mac user (yet) but I'm happening to be one soon. I'm planning to use one external HD for PC and Mac too. I know there are some issues around the FAT32, NTFS and HFS thing.

I had an idea to kinda solve this problem, I was wondering if this could work:

1. Connect the Mac to the Ex HD through FW and the PC through USB
2. Format the external HD to HFS with a Mac (then transfer all files on it)
3. (Buy and) Install MacDrive on the Windows PC

The Mac will have no problem reading or writing the files on the HD due to it's HFS

The PC recognizes the drive as an Mac format but it can read and write the files on that HD.

Could this work?

Formatting the drive as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and using MacDrive on the Windows PC is a good idea, and will work well.

The one thing that probably won't work, and will probably cause big problems is...
I would NOT recommend that you have two computers connected to a USB/FireWire hard drive at the same time. (If you mean you would connect them to two computers at different times, that's fine.) The most likely result of having two computers connected to a USB/FireWire drive at the same time is that one of the interfaces (probably USB) will be turned off and not do anything. The other possible result is that you will have massive file system damage to the drive because it is getting control messages simultaneously from two different computers.

You should only connect the drive to one computer at a time.

Trevor

I have the technical knowledge of a baked potato...
 

and i was wondering if anyone could help.

I'm going to buy an external hard drive. and put things on it. (not food or coffee mugs or anything. data type stuff.) Things like AVIs and flash documents... maybe the odd quicktime if i can stop my quicktime player from being evil.

Anyway, I digress.

I basically want to take AVI's, flash documents, jpgs and such from my PC (windows XP) to a shiny brand new mac. And maybe vice versa if i'm feeling adventurous. I'm looking at the Western Digital 60GB Passport External USB 2.0 2.5" Hard Drive. Will I need to split the hard drive or something, or can i just plonk whatever i like on and hope i won't have any compatability problem?

Thanks guys.

-a

No, you don't need to split the hard drive (which would be worse than putting donuts on it), you just need to make sure it is formatted as FAT32 (or DOS formatting, as the Mac understands it). If it comes pre-formatted as FAT32, you're in business. If you have to re-format it, it may or may not be tricky. The Mac can format the drive as a FAT32 volume using Disk Utility. Windows XP can format it as FAT32, but its format utility will only produce 32GB patitions as a maximum. However, there are 3rd party utilities (Partition Magic is the best known of them) that will format the drive as FAT32 under XP without that limitation.

While it shouldn't really make any difference which utilty makes the FAT32 volume, I personally think that it might. If you need to format it yourself, I recommend acquiring Partition Magic and formatting it on the PC. But others may (and I know do) disagree about whether this is necessary.

What you CANNOT do is format the drive as NTFS on XP, because the Mac can mount an NTFS volume only in a read-only form, so you can't write to the disk.

The last caveat is that FAT32 can only handle files up to 4 GB in size. Now, that's a pretty big file, but if you are digitizing movies or the like, you can get them.

This makes is all SOUND a lot more complicated than it is. It would be nicer if PCs had FireWire standard as Macs do, but most don't, so USB is your only option in all liklihood.

Joe VanZandt

cheers man.
 

that's great. There's a possibility i might need to upload files bigger than 4mb, but it's probably not essential. (animation student, you see. I can probably split files shot by shot or scene by scene.)

is there any way of knowing if i the hard drive is set to FAT32 before i buy it? or is it just one of those things you realise after you've shelled out a horribly large amount of cash?

-a

MacDrive may be a good app, but you have to make sure there is no windows partition artifacts on your HDD. Otherwise MD will allways ask you to choose a disk to permanently delete every time you mount it AND WILL DRIVE YOU NUTS!
I use 5 HDDs with Mac and PC.
1. I got a firewire card for PC. USB2 PCI cards are not reliable on Mac (maybe Sonnet makes a good one). PCI USB2 has frozen my external disk and made awfull mess during video edit. PCMCIA crds on Powerbooks have never failed.
2. Look out with larger drives. Some external cases support only 128gb drives and will see only 128. So there will be a serious conflict with actual free byte count and reported one. It will work until you hit this magic 128 number.
3. I format my drive in windows 2000.

It is fairly common for the drives to come pre-formatted as FAT32, and fairly uncommon for them to come pre-formatted HFS(+), but there isn't any real industry standard. It really doesn't MATTER if it is pre-formatted or not (you could buy a bare drive and put it in an enclosure and format it yourself, for that matter), since re-formatting it is not a major problem. But you might call the place where you intend to buy the drive and ASK if it is pre-formatted, and if so, how.

Vankaru is right that some enclosures (and some earlier internal controllers in the Mac) would only support drives of 128 GB, but if you buy the large drive IN an enclosure, that certainly shouldn't be a problem, and most recently manufactured enclosures (if you buy separately) support large drives.

If getting a FireWire PCI card for your PC and a FireWire enclosure are a financial option for you, that is a good idea. The implementation of USB 2.0 in the Mac isn't particularly good, so you'll get much better performance if you can use FireWire. I wish PCs would more consistently include that on their motherboards, but I haven't seen a strong trend in that direction yet.

I haven't personally ever used MacDrive, but Trevor is an excellent source, so that is certainly another option for you to consider.

Joe VanZandt

Ext hard disk to work on both mac osx 10.5.4 and windows vista
 

basically i used disk utility, under the partition section click options and select the last tab which alows you to select an MS-DOS partition and therefore allowing you to use your hard disk on both mac and windows....

I have an external hard drive that is formatted as FAT32 and I've been using almost exclusively with a Windows XP machine.

When I recently hooked it up to a Mac, I have had the curious problem that some folders are empty, while others have the right files in the them. This holds for both the Mac front end, and when I look at the files in Unix.

Any insight?

I thought it might have something to do with resource forks for files or something?