Hard Drive Question

[mateo305ci]

Good afternoon all,

I am relatively new to MACs, I just bought a MacBook Pro a few weeks ago. I am running Boot Camp with XP Pro installed, and am having trouble with my external hard drive's configuration.

This is a 250 GB SeaGate hard drive. It will be serving several purposes:

1. It will be used by both my MAC OS and by XP
2. It will be used by my friends who all have Windows.

How can I ensure that the drive will be recognized by everyone without having MacDrive installed on every one of my friends' computers?

Thanks!

[Neil321]

You could install macfuse & NTFS-3G on your Mac and format it NTFS or your best best would be to format it FAT32 that way everyone would have read/write access to it without having to install anything ( one downside old file system with 4GB file transfer limitations )

[mateo305ci]

Any downsides to MacFuse...as far as performance/slowing down my Mac?

I am always somewhat skeptical of free programs.

[Neil321]

Any downsides to MacFuse...as far as performance/slowing down my Mac?

I am always somewhat skeptical of free programs.

Nope not that I'm aware of, if your looking for a paid solution to NTFS read/write support look into paragon ( i have this installed and performance wise it works great )

[Stridder44]

You could install macfuse & NTFS-3G on your Mac and format it NTFS or your best best would be to format it FAT32 that way everyone would have read/write access to it without having to install anything ( one downside old file system with 4GB file transfer limitations )

x2. Macfuse is pretty awesome.