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?