Sharing External Hdd

[Razorhog]

I recently bought a Western Digital 320GB External Hard drive. It is currently attached to my windows xp machine. When I get a mac, can I back up the mac there as well? Maybe plug in the firewire to the mac and the usb to the xp box? Any thoughts/suggestions greatly appreciated.

 

[yellow]

It depends on what/how you want to back up..

First off, OS X cannot write to NTFS, so if it's formatted NTFS (which it probably is), you'll have to either reformat it FAT32 (and deal with it's limitations) or crate a separate partiotion for OS X to use, or reformat it HFS+ and buy MacDrive for the XP box.

If you want to clone your Mac to the external, then it HAS to be formatted HFS+ for it to be bootable (and therefore useful). Which gets you into option 2 and 3.

As far as having both the computer plugged into it at one time.. I don't think you can do that.

 

[Razorhog]

I'm pretty sure it is FAT32. On the western digital website it says "Preformatted for Windows. Simple Mac formatting instructions included."

 

[yellow]

To me that means it's probably formatted NTFS and they include instructions on how to format it to HFS+ with a Mac. Just check it by getting it's properties in XP.

 

[Razorhog]

I checked the properties and it is fat32. Does that mean I can hook it up to a Mac and read/write files from it, as long as they aren't over 4gb?

 

[yellow]

Yep! Sure does!

Note that you cannot install OS X on it (or clone a bootable OS X to it).