external drive with NTFS format acting quirky

Discussion in 'Mac Accessories' started by saltyzoo, Oct 4, 2007.

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  1. saltyzoo, Oct 4, 2007

    saltyzoo macrumors 65816

    saltyzoo

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    Oct 4, 2007
    #1
    I have a 750 meg external USB drive formatted with a very large cluster size (I store only large files so the large cluster size reduces fragmentation).

    When plugging the drive into my macBook Pro, I see a couple of directories out of the 70 or 80 directories that I see when it is plugged into a win XP box, the other directories do not appear.

    Anybody know why this is? And is there a way around it short of reformatting the drive?
     
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  2. Veritas&Equitas, Oct 4, 2007

    Veritas&Equitas macrumors 68000

    Veritas&Equitas

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    Oct 31, 2005
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    Twin Cities, MN
    #2
    Wow, I don't know how large the cluster can be if your whole drive is 750 mb! :eek:

    OS X and Windows recognize different folders...I assume when you plug the NTFS into OS X it has a .Volume folder, maybe a few .icn. Don't worry about them. They are necessary for the drive to function in Windows, and don't affect anything in OS X.

    If you don't want them to show up, format the drive as Mac OS Extended (HFS+). However, if you do this, Windows won't be able to recognize it.

    Moral of the story, either deal with the few folders or only have the drive work in OS X and not windows.
     
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  3. saltyzoo, Oct 4, 2007

    saltyzoo thread starter macrumors 65816

    saltyzoo

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    Oct 4, 2007
    #3
    Sorry, that should have been gig not meg.

    The directories that appear are my application directories, not system directories. But only a couple of the 70+ show up.
     
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