External firewire drive on both mac and PC?

[renikm]

Hey, I have a External Firewire enclosure from OWC with a spiffy 160 GB HFS+ formated hardrive in it. I use it mostly on my mac, but now that I have a PC too it would be great to be able to backup and swap files on my PC.

Is there any way i can get the Hard drive to work on my PC without reformating? I definately want to keep it formated for the mac.
If i need to install something on my PC, that could work. I have them both on a switch but mac/pc networking never has ben solid for me.

And while i'm at it, are there any firewire switchboxes, so you don't have to plug/unplug firewire devices when you want to switch computers?

thanks all :)

[noel4r]

Also, I would appreciate it if someone would tell me how to format my external hd using the FAT32 system under Panther. Maybe you can post a pic or something coz I just cant see it under System Preferences. Thanks

[Toeknee]

Well the thing is that PCs don't recognise the HFS+ format that many macs use. BUT the mac does recognise whatever format windows uses. I found this out when my friend formatted my FW 80GB HD to back up his laptop. Then when I got back home I plugged it into my 'Book and I could see all his song and movie files without having to format it back to HFS+. So to answer your question you can use the hard drive with both OSs but you have to format it in the XP world first.

[Chip NoVaMac]

Well the thing is that PCs don't recognise the HFS+ format that many macs use. BUT the mac does recognise whatever format windows uses. I found this out when my friend formatted my FW 80GB HD to back up his laptop. Then when I got back home I plugged it into my 'Book and I could see all his song and movie files without having to format it back to HFS+. So to answer your question you can use the hard drive with both OSs but you have to format it in the XP world first.

I'll second that. Though I am not sure about the FAT32. Most ready made externals I have tried worked under the Mac.

[jeremy.king]

If i need to install something on my PC, that could work

You could use MacOpener. http://www.dataviz.com/products/macopener/index.html

[jeremy.king]

Also, I would appreciate it if someone would tell me how to format my external hd using the FAT32 system under Panther. Maybe you can post a pic or something coz I just cant see it under System Preferences. Thanks

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040724110933265&query=format+FAT32

[brap]

I use this (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/), and have the PC reading HFS+. That way I can have an external bootable clone of my Powerbook's hard drive.

[renikm]

Well the thing is that PCs don't recognise the HFS+ format that many macs use. BUT the mac does recognise whatever format windows uses. I found this out when my friend formatted my FW 80GB HD to back up his laptop. Then when I got back home I plugged it into my 'Book and I could see all his song and movie files without having to format it back to HFS+. So to answer your question you can use the hard drive with both OSs but you have to format it in the XP world first.

"Is there any way i can get the Hard drive to work on my PC without reformating? I definately want to keep it formated for the mac."

[renikm]

Thanks for the two solutions, Mac Opener and Mac Drive.
Anyone know of any free options or are those my only two?

Thanks for the feedback so far!

cheers,

[brap]

Thanks for the two solutions, Mac Opener and Mac Drive.
Anyone know of any free options or are those my only two?
I spent a while looking around, and the only free one was limited to HFS (read: not HFS+, though I forget the name). Therefore, it's free only if you want to go peer-to-peer, and even then they're really damn hard to find ;)

In the end, I bought Macdrive 6, because it's a decent piece of software. Does what it says on the tin.

[cebritt]

If you're considering MacOpener, I'd recommend that you spend a little extra and get the Conversions Plus Suite. It includes MacOpener plus many Mac to PC and strange PC file translators. It allows you to open virtually any file someone sends you. Our church recently switched from Mac to PC (Grrr!) and needed a way to import WordPerfect Mac files into MS Word. Conversions Plus was the only solution and it was only $59 at eCost.com.

[estherau]

Hi, I hope someone can help me. I have a PC running windows XP networked to 2 of my macs. I bought macdrive6 and formated a couple of the internal PC drives to HFS. Can I actually clone one of my boot diskdrives on my macs to one of the PC HFS format drives and would I be able to boot from this if I had a drive failure on the mac. I know I could put a disk image on it using carbon copy cloner but I'm wondering about an actual clone.
Love esther
ps the reason I want to do this is the PC has rackmounted drives so would be really great for backing up all my stuff, then I could get rid of all the transformers which I have attached to my external firewire drives which I currently use for backup