firewire drive question

[joeyjojoe]

I'm thinking of getting a firewire drive to back up all my PC data upon before I get a powerbook. Is it possible to have the PC format it and store all the needed data and then connect it to the PB in the future? Will I run into any issues? Is there a correct way to do this so I don't have to reformat the drive and lose all my data?

 

[jamall]

You saw in the previous thread started by fixed up north that issues arise when trying to connect a PC formatted drive to a Mac. If you are getting your Powerbook after Panther is released and can copy whatever is backed up on the drive to the Powerbook before reformatting the drive then there will be no problems as Panther can read NTFS format and you can copy all your stuff back once the drive is in HFS+ format. If however you have more files to back up than will be free space on your Powerbook's drive then it gets a little trickier. The ideal solution would be to use a mac to format the drive in HFS+ format and use MacDrive 5 to use it in Windows.

 

[joeyjojoe]

Well I'm going to be getting a 200/250 GB firewire drive, so moving the data onto the mac is not an option. I was thinking of doing a FAT32 format and then hopefully the mac wouldn't have a problem with the drive, and would be able to access the data. Should that be okay?

I'm also wondering how reliable these drives are ... as in I don't want to lose the information (and I will be selling my PC as soon as I get the powerbook). Can anyone comment on reliability of either the Western Digital or LaCie firewire drives?

 

[RiseAgainst]

You can. but...

some thing sort of get a little messy. You will be able to use all of the files, but some file names might get a little corrupted. Especially with longer file names. When I did this it got really annoying and ended up changing it back to OS Extended.