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Lacie external hard drive

dwl017

dwl017

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 10, 2007
562
0
Murder Capitol DC
Good morning all,

Does anyone know how I get my windows pc to see a lacie external hard drive that was set up on my Mac. All I did was plug it into my Mac via firewire but when I plug it into my windows based pc the machine does not find it. Im running XP on the windows based pc.

Thanks
 
Did you format the drive using HFS+ ? This is a Mac format method, and Windows cannot read it.

The best thing to do is (if there isn't much data on the drive already) copy all the data onto your Mac, then use Disk Utility (found in Utilities) and format it in FAT32 (MS-DOS) format. Then copy all the data back on to the drive and your Windows PC should see it no problem.

You might find you'll have slightly slower transfer rates when writing stuff to the drive on the Mac but if you are using FireWire then you won't notice a thing.

N.B. Above info is assumed you did format it using HFS+ format.
 
Bear in mind though that keeping it in HFS+ format will mean that you will have to install the third party software for every Windows based computer you want to use your hard drive with. Not very convinent if a mate wants a copy of something etc.
 
Another vote for MacDrive. Been using it for the last year with no problems what so ever.

Using FAT32 will restrict file-sizes to around 4GB, a big no go in my world.
 
Temujin said:
Another vote for MacDrive. Been using it for the last year with no problems what so ever.

Using FAT32 will restrict file-sizes to around 4GB, a big no go in my world.
Click to expand...

How's the speed on the mac drive in windows?
 
Just as a word of caution. I'm new to Mac having just got a MacBook Pro. Have 3 external Lacie firewire drives attached. Until a couple of hours ago, they were all formatted as FAT32. The reason I changed was because I found that under certain circumstances, when I created new folders or files with almost the same name (e.g., "part a" and "part b"), OSX would go in and rename the folders and I'd end up with 2 folders with the same name (e.g., 2 folders named "part b"). I know...sounds impossible but it's not and I had to jump through hoops to get rid of the files.

Made my first call to Apple support and got the runaround about them not supporting external drives but finally got thru to someone who indicated that this "could be a situation which exists in the implementation of FAT32."

Just my 2 cents...

-ilene
 
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