I just bought a Western Digital Passport 250GB hard drive. I'm using it to store all of my movies that happen to be in .MP4 format. I never formatted to reformatted the drive. I just plugged it in and started adding my movie files to it. If I wanted to watch these movies at my girlfriends house, would I be able to take the hard drive and plug it into her PC and watch the movies from there? Is that possible? Should I have formatted or reformatted the drive before adding the movies? Do I have to format/reformat the drive to watch the movies on my girlfriends PC? Thanks!
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Hard Drive from Mac to PC?
- Thread starter jason2811
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well if your never formatted the drive when you got it to use with your mac it could be FAT32 format. check by clicking on the drive on the desktop or in the finder and and pressing "command-I" and look at "Format:".
if its FAT32 then both a pc and mac can read/write to it. the only problem with FAT32 is that theres a 4GB file write limit in windows or Mac OS X. if its Mac OS Extended (journaled) then only a mac will read/write to it so you will have to use MacDrive.
if its FAT32 then both a pc and mac can read/write to it. the only problem with FAT32 is that theres a 4GB file write limit in windows or Mac OS X. if its Mac OS Extended (journaled) then only a mac will read/write to it so you will have to use MacDrive.
You can format it for NTFS which will allow PCs to read/write to it no problem - only catch being is you will need a program to allow your OSX to read/write to that drive. (there are a couple out there)
The FAT32 has the file size problem - but is fully compatible between PC / OSX.
And Mac OSX Extended - can only be read by Macs - windows (at least in my case) won't even mount the drive.
The FAT32 has the file size problem - but is fully compatible between PC / OSX.
And Mac OSX Extended - can only be read by Macs - windows (at least in my case) won't even mount the drive.
I checked and the format is listed as MS-DOS (FAT 32). I plugged it into my old PC and the .MP4 movies played fine so I guess all is well. Thanks for your help everyone.
One more question though. Richthomas said that here is a 4GB file limit in Windows and Max OSX. This is only for ONE 4GB file, correct? Because many DVD rips at 4.3GB (but they are broken into a bunch of smaller files, not one gignatic 4.3GB file) so I should have no problem moving those DVDrip files to the hard drive, correct? Thanks!
One more question though. Richthomas said that here is a 4GB file limit in Windows and Max OSX. This is only for ONE 4GB file, correct? Because many DVD rips at 4.3GB (but they are broken into a bunch of smaller files, not one gignatic 4.3GB file) so I should have no problem moving those DVDrip files to the hard drive, correct? Thanks!
no you shouldn't have any problem since when you rip dvds, they are usually ripped into 1gb files. they just can't read/write 4gb+ files in a single chunk.