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New hard drives be seen by windows and osx?

L

lizinthesky

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 15, 2007
11
0
Hi

I just bought a mac pro, hevent even turned it on yet - so excited!

I have a question - I bought two extra 500Gb drives for it third party. I want to use bootcamp on this new machine, and I want the drives to be able to be read and accessed by both operating systems.

Is there any particular method of setting up the new drives, in terms of file systems etc, I need to be aware of? I'm relatively new with playing with hardware in macs, I've had a laptop until now.

Liz
 
You have to format the externals with FAT32.

The Mac's internal hard drive is formatted with HFS+ journaled.
Windows uses normally NTFS which can be read by Mac but not written on (without special software at least).

So you have to format it with your Mac (search for "Disk Utility" on your Mac or look further in the forums, there are many how to's and it's not very hard.)

Windows could also format it with FAT32, but it only would format the first 32GB, which is not good for your 500GB drive of course. If it's for example an Western Digital drive, then you could go to their website and look for a reformat tool, those normally can also format you whole drive (as your Mac does)

I have an external drive myself (I've put my oringal MB drive in an external case after I upgraded the my MB), which I use with Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linux. Only Vista doesn't really like it and produces some errors sometime. But it also should work with Vista.

With FAT32 you have a limitation: you can't save files on it which are bigger than 4GB. So if you're doind video editing with big files or something like this, then you won't be able so save it on you're external drive.

In such a case, you could to several partitions on the external drive, for example one with HFS+ (to save big files) and one with FAT32 (to share files with Windows)
 
lizinthesky said:
Hi

I just bought a mac pro, hevent even turned it on yet - so excited!

I have a question - I bought two extra 500Gb drives for it third party. I want to use bootcamp on this new machine, and I want the drives to be able to be read and accessed by both operating systems.

Is there any particular method of setting up the new drives, in terms of file systems etc, I need to be aware of? I'm relatively new with playing with hardware in macs, I've had a laptop until now.

Liz
Click to expand...

MacFUSE might be worth a Google. I found this:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/li...write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html

That's pre-Leopard, though.
 
Thanks for your replies...

The drives are internal, not external drives, btw.

Is there definately no way they can be formatted using a better/newer system than Fat32? I've had problems on my PC recently with large files, and that would be frustrating on my mac.

What happens which you order a new mac which has spare drives in it from apple? Can windows read/write to them through bootcamp?

eDIT: I just spotted infrared's link... will look into that cheers x
 
Thanks for the info.

I've also found this piece of software: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

If I were to choose one of these software options, which do you think would be better? Formatting in NTFS and running the Paragon reader in OSX, or formatting in HFS and running the MacDrive reader in Windows?
 
Format as FAT32 on the Mac and read in both Windows and OS X natively.

If you want to use Bootcamp on a drive you have to format it as HFS+ and then use MacDrive to access it on Windows.
 
Hi,

FAT32 on two 500 GB drives? Quite a joke.

MacDrive gives you full read/write capability of the Mac partition from Windows. NTFS is readable from Mac OS without any additional soft. If you need more, you've got choice between MacFuse (which is updated for Leopard btw: http://www.macworld.com/article/133217/2008/04/macfuse15.html ) and Paragon. I'm not that sure though about the qualities of the Paragon driver, but you can use it for 10 days I believe and then make it up for yourself.

If you won't be happy with Paragon, don't forget to uninstall the driver after these 10 trial days: first versions used to unmount the Windows partition from desktop after expiring (don't know how it's arranged now).

sash
 
lizinthesky said:
or formatting in HFS and running the MacDrive reader in Windows?
Click to expand...

Hi,

I have never had a problem with MacDrive nor have I heard about anybody having any issues with it. I'd go for MacDrive.

sash
 
I installed something on my G3 that allows it to read and write to NTFS volumes with absolutely no issues.... I can't quite remember what it was (other than it was freeware) or how I found it, though; it may have been that MacFUSE thing that another poster mentioned, though, and I am running 10.4.9, not Leopard.

Anyway, I doubt it's impossible to get it to read NTFS on a Leopard machine.

Okay yeah you know what I just googled "run NTFS on Leopard," and got this- http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

Looks like MacFuse runs on 10.5 now. Would it have been that hard to google that?
 
Hi guys, thanks for all your replies.

I found a free solution:
The trick is to install MacFuse, followed next by installing this: http://www.soft32.com/download_200394.html

Works a treat. Read and writes to all 3 ntfs volumes.

I also installed this on windows: http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html
It's not as comprehensive, but its free, and runs on 64bit windows, which MacDrive does not. It is an application, you launch it and can access files which are on the HFS OSX partition. This is read only, if you want to edit the file you prob need to copy it to a windows disk.

But now that I have my two 500gb drives working fine with ntfs on both OSs, I only need that app in Windows if I hapen to have left something in the mac partition.

Lovely.

Cheers guys,

Liz
 
usb hfs drive seen on windows xp

I have a mac, and 2 PCs that i work on. I just got a seagate 500gb freeagent usb 2.0 external hard drive. I formatted the drive on my mac as hfs, and it comes up with a drive letter in "my computer" and I was able to open the files from the drive. (which I wasn't expecting) The drive has a little red apple on it. I did not install any special software to read apple drives. However, on my other pc it only comes up in the device manager, but no letter in "My computer" Any ideas on what's going on?


thanks
 
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