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External Drives and proper formatting

mainstreetmark

mainstreetmark

macrumors 68020
Original poster
May 7, 2003
2,228
293
Saint Augustine, FL
OK, so I bought a Maxtor 200gig drive from Best Buy a few hours ago.

It came with a manual and a CD and all that crap which I kind of threw over there in the box and didn't mess with much. I just plugged it in.

So, there sits my 189 out of 200 gig (I guess 200 gig was the precooked weight) and I can dump stuff on it just fine, but every so often, it runs into a file it doesn't like, such as when a folder has a custom icon. The copy quits on it.

So, this is because it's formatted for a PC, right? And some of the files confuse the PC filesystem or something, with their extended character sets and such.

I suppose I could format it natively for the Mac, but then I couldn't go over to my PC buddy's houses and be able to use it, right?

So, my tradeoff is: be able to use with PCs, but loose being able to put custom icons on folders?

Is that pretty much it? Are there speed issues I should be scared of?
 
Interesting. I am just about to buy a LaCie 250gig and wonder at OSX/XP compatibility for cross system file transfers. Hopefully someone can help us...
 
well, so far, the most frustrating part is, i can't just grab a folder and drag it to the drive, because I inevitably have some file in there with a character in it that it doesn't like, and unbelievably, I can't just skip the problematic file - the same complaint I have with Windows XP when it comes across a single problem file during a copy of 1000 files.
 
I assume the file format of your drive is FAT32? I use MacDrive 5 to access my firewire Lacie HFS+ formatted partition on my windows 2000 or XP computer. Works with an iTunes library, Pro Tools, and general files. I haven't put it through its paces fully yet, but it seems promising. You have to format the drive on a mac first though.

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive5/

They do offer student discounts and a 5-day trial FYI.

The only downside is hooking up to a PC that doesn't have macdrive on it. But it's better for me than waiting for a stable NTFS read/write driver to be written for OSX.

Also, if you want to repartition the drive in 2000/XP, you can only do a max of 32GB per partition. If you have a 9x computer, you can do larger, but MS put a lock on formatting FAT32 partitions to push the adoption of NTFS.
 
mainstreetmark said:
So, there sits my 189 out of 200 gig (I guess 200 gig was the precooked weight)
Click to expand...

The reasoning behind this is that the drive size is (approximately) "2029,3720,4736" bytes. A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, etc. So once all the math is done with, the REAL size of a (this) 200GB disk is 189GB.

Sorry, this is no help to your problem. :(
 
well, I just wound up assuming I can't have folder icons. And, as far as backing up data goes, I decided just to use tar.gz's (or .zips) for backups. It's mildly cleaner, I guess. Still requires me to expand it out to get the backup out of it, but whatever.

Now that I type this, I bet I could make a big disk image (.dmg) for my mac-specific stuff, eh? What do you guys think about that?
 
mainstreetmark said:
jeez... let me guess - max file size on this kind of format is 4 gigabytes.
Click to expand...

Gotta love good 'ol file allocation tables. In their defense, hard drives were quite small when FAT32 was developed.

I'd be interested in how to open a DMG in windows though...
 
basically just want a drive that will extend the capacity of my 75gig powerbook drive, and have the added benefit that I could truck it over to my many PC friend's house and copy their stuff. (yes, that's right - you all do it too)
 
I have a Maxtor 200 GB drive in my external enclosure. I have used it without any problems or bugs. The only setup I did was to put it into my enclosure. No formatting or anything. Could there be some problem with the hardware/firmware of the enclosure you are using?
 
External Drive

I also purchased a Maxtor 200 GB external hard drive off Ebay. I just signed on to your discussion as I am looking for help. I have a Powerbook G4 and I plugged in the USB connection and the external HD icon showed up on the desktop. I renamed the HD to VW's HD. I don't know if that was my first mistake or not. I then copied a large number of jpeg files to the external HD successfully. I then began to copy an i-Movie file and when I saw it was going to be 63 minutes I cancelled the copy and was going to use the firewire hoping it would be quicker. I put the HD icon in the trash and changed to the firewire. When I did this, a window said the disk is unreadable and asked if I wanted to initialize it. I can't even get the icon to show up on the desktop now either. I really needed to be able to transfer files (jpeg and Powerpoint) between Mac and PC. I tried it on my Windows XP PC and it also stated it was unreadable. I checked under the Apple System profiler and it does recognize the device but I don't know what to do now??
I'm a somewhat "techie" teacher who knows just enough to be dangerous.

Any help would be appreciated. I'm kinda of sick as I have a huge i-Movie project that needs to have been completed yesterday.
 
I've encountered similar issues with an external FW Maxtor 80GB drive. I initially formatted it on a Win2K PC at work with the Maxtor disc utility and I ended up creating 2 x 32GB patitions and a 3rd that used up the remaining space (it then shows up as 3 volumes on my Mac).

I run into the same problems when copying files with the illegal windows filename characters (copy of multiple files stops when it hits the bad character in a single filename). I also see similar problems when moving other files, such as an iMovie project folder. I think it might be a resource/data fork issue.

Short of using the drive utilities mentioned above or compressing files I don't know of a good solution. When I was moving a large quantity of MP3 files from my home Mac machine to work PC I just ended up searching iTunes for the forbidden characters and changed them from within iTunes if they were part of the artist, album title, or song name. It was a bit of a pain but didn't take too long to locate them by simply entering the characters one by one in the iTunes search filed. (" * / : < > ? \ | ar the illeagl characters). Maybe there are better ways to deal with this issue, hope someone else has better suggestions.
 
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