formatting HDDs for PPC Macs AND Windows machines

[RedCroissant]

Hello to all,

I have recently been helping a friend with data recovery and the DR went really well actually. What has been the real problem is getting his windows machines to recognize the HDD to which I saved the recovered data.

Using my PMG5 Quad, I recovered the data from his machine (a 2010 13" MBP) and had it stored on one of my internal HDDS. From there I copied it to an external formatted as MBR. The weird things is that his machines didn't recognize it.

I then reformatted another drive again with MBR but created a GUID partition (no luck).

I tried again with a simple OS X journaled format and that didn't work either. Should I just try a FAT32 or ExFAT? Am I just missing something simply when it comes to formatting HDDs that can be read/written to by either OS X or Windows?

 

[eyoungren]

Still have the Intel iMac?

Use it to format a drive as NTFS (from within Windows). Copy the files over.

You may also want to install MacFUSE on the G5.

 

[RedCroissant]

Still have the Intel iMac?

Use it to format a drive as NTFS (from within Windows). Copy the files over.

You may also want to install MacFUSE on the G5.

Hi Erik,

No I don't. I actually sold it :-(

So now I am down to my PPC Macs only again. I do have my wife's Intel iMac though. Does it have to be an Intel iMac to format a drive as NTFS?

 

[eyoungren]

Hi Erik,

No I don't. I actually sold it :-(

So now I am down to my PPC Macs only again. I do have my wife's Intel iMac though. Does it have to be an Intel iMac to format a drive as NTFS?

No, but Disk Utility does not have the option to format as NTFS and from what I hear ExFAT is not what you need.

If you have a PC you have access to this would be even better.

 

[MacCubed]

No, but Disk Utility does not have the option to format as NTFS from what I hear ExFAT is not what you need.

If you have a PC you have access to this would be even better.

A while back I needed to use my friends external hard drive that was formatted as NFTS it came with a utility called Tuxera NFTS which allowed me to read and right files to the HDD. Now in disk utitily I can format as NTFS.

 

[eyoungren]

A while back I needed to use my friends external hard drive that was formatted as NFTS it came with a utility called Tuxera NFTS which allowed me to read and right files to the HDD. Now in disk utitily I can format as NTFS.

Tuxera would be MacFUSE. I only know it as MacFUSE though as that was what it was called in the first releases and that's what it's labeled in the System Preference pane.

Disk Utility is not showing me an ability to format NTFS though, even on my MBP which has this installed.

That may be just because I don't have an external drive connected though.

 

[Altemose]

FAT32 would work well but all files must be under 4 GB in size.

 

[jruschme]

Tuxera would be MacFUSE. I only know it as MacFUSE though as that was what it was called in the first releases and that's what it's labeled in the System Preference pane.

A minor nit or two...

MacFUSE is actually a glue layer for allowing the use of user-mode (rather than kernel-mode) file system drivers with OS X. The FUSE project actually has its roots in Linux. IIRC, MacFUSE has been superseded by OSXFuse.

Tuxera NTFS is a commercial implementation of the NTFS-3G FUSE driver that is compatible with MacFUSE.

 

[eyoungren]

A minor nit or two...

MacFUSE is actually a glue layer for allowing the use of user-mode (rather than kernel-mode) file system drivers with OS X. The FUSE project actually has its roots in Linux. IIRC, MacFUSE has been superseded by OSXFuse.

Tuxera NTFS is a commercial implementation of the NTFS-3G FUSE driver that is compatible with MacFUSE.

Thank you for the clarification. I prefer to have my facts straight when telling people things so this is good to know!

 

[RedCroissant]

update to the ridiculous

I download MacFUSE and tuxera and have formated to drive as NTFS so we'll see if his computers recognize the drive now.

This is just lame! I was able to recover his data, copy the data, and now because he owns a Windows machine, I have to download and install a NTFS enabler just so he can have his files. Anyway, it's been interesting and I'm glad for any assistance because I love learning new things about my machines and their capabilities.