External Hard Drive question

[thi12ty7]

Hi

I have an extrenal storage harddrive that i use with my windows desktop system. How come with my powerbook it does not reconize the storage drive? Do i have to format it a certain way or because its windows formated, apple will not reconize it. Please help. Thanks

 

[joecool85]

USB/FW? If it is a bus powered case and you are plugging it into the keyboard it won't work...

 

[thi12ty7]

its a usb external harddrive

 

[Eniregnat]

How is the drive formated?

FAT32 and UnixOS are the only supported cross platform formats for large file structures. They have their limitations compared to NTFS(Windows proprietary) and AFS/AFS Journaled (Apple proprietary). Ethernet compatible drives usually have native drivers that store information in one of these two formats, or in their own proprietary format. For instance, SNAP servers use their own OS and file system. Most optical disks have cross platform file systems, but are more limited.

You might notice that flash media (SD, Memory Stick, PCMCIA,etc…) will format media in a FAT16 or FAT12, which are universally accessible, not verbose, but have good legacy compliance.