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pyune

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 18, 2006
19
0
Thanks for all your input on my recent threads about my plan on purchasing a new external harddrive. Just an hour ago I went down to the nearby best buy and purchased a Seagate 100gig external portable harddrive. I am very happy with its portable size and harddrive capabilties. HOWEVER the main reason I bought this was the hold al lmy multimedia files such as Divx movies and music etc, but when I read the manuel they said it is not reccomended to share files between Mac OS and windows. My macbook pro has both and what I wished was to watch movies and listen to music on both OS's for convenience. There are directions in setting up the harddrive to share both but they said I need 3rd party software for windows to read Mac files. Can anyone help me out with what program I would need? And has anyone who has done this before ever have problemS? data loss etc. Well thats all for my questions thanks for your time.
 

Nuc

macrumors 6502a
Jan 20, 2003
798
6
TN
Can't you just format it as fat32 using disk utilities? That would work for both windows and mac.

Nuc
 
F

freakonguitar

Guest
Go into Disk Utility and format it to fat32 and it will be able to share files....what it WON"T do in that format is allow you to use it as a scratch disk when editting movies. You can store movies on it, but when making them it won't allow you to apply effects etc....
 

Fleetwood Mac

macrumors 65816
Apr 27, 2006
1,265
0
Canada
Keep in mind that you can't store files larger than 4GB on a FAT32 partition.

The third party software mentioned is MacDrive by Mediafour.
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

This is a great piece of software, but DO NOT let it have access to your system drive (only the external). There have been reports of currupted OS X partitions due to MacDrive.
 

pyune

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 18, 2006
19
0
The FAT32 Format on my external Harddrive .. is supposedly factory default.. But i read the manual and it said they dont reccomend FAT32 to be used for a Mac. They said for me to initialize the harddrive for a Mac and then use it for both Windows and Mac. I am seriously confused...on what to do.When I go to Disk Utility the Volume of my Sea GAte says MS-DOS File System...what do I MAKE it??!!# Mac OS Extended? Unix file system? Free space.. someon ehelp me-___-
 

Fleetwood Mac

macrumors 65816
Apr 27, 2006
1,265
0
Canada
You have to make a decision.

MSDOS is fat32 with a different name. If you don't have any files larger than 4GB, use this file system. It will work with both Windows and Mac.

If you are using files larger than that, format as Mac OS X extended journaled (HFS), and install MacDrive on the Windows partition.
 
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