One hardrive going to mac & pc?

[DarkVictory]

I just got a new mabook 2.4 ghz. This is my first time using mac. On my PC I have a ton of music/video/photos that are on an external Western Digital Hard Drive.

Is it possible to connect my macbook to that hard drive while still having it connected to my PC? I wouldn't be using the Mac and PC at the same time. I was able to get my monitor connected to both, so I'm hoping there's a way to do that with my external hard drive as well.

 

[old-wiz]

If the two systems are connected to a LAN, then you can share the disk. If the systems are not connected via LAN/wi-fi, then you cannot share the disk without unplugging from one system and plugging into another.

A case that people imagine is you have an external hard disk with USB and firewire, so the theory is you can use USB on the PC and firewire on the Mac and share the disk that way. Unfortunately it doesn't work. While it is possible for software to pass the disk back in forth via locking techniques, this is not found in OSx or Windows.

For example, what would happen if both systems try to create a file at the same time? without locking the disk would quickly become corrupted and useless.