USB external Hard drives with OSX and Windows

[jodders]

Hi,

I recently bought an imac and very happy with it so far. Having been on windows before, I backuped up a lot of media on to my hard disk. A problem I have is,that I can't add things to my external USB hard drive with Leopard although I can only read from it.

Is there away around this?

In future,if i Need want to buy a new hard drive,is there a particular format that reads well with both OSX and Windows?

 

[bigandy]

NTFS can't be written by Mac OS X, although there are third party (mostly experimental) apps that support this. I'll bet your drive is NTFS

Here's the deal:

NTFS: Windows - read/write; Mac OS - read
FAT32: Windows - read/write; Mac OS - read/write
Mac: Windows - none; Mac OS - read/write

Notes:

FAT32 can't hold individual files larger than either 2 or 4 Gb (can't remember which, but I think it's 4Gb). Pretty crap if you want to store large video files, for example.

Mac formats can be read by Windows if you get MacDrive from Mediafour. I'd recommend the Mac format partition and MacDrive, it's by far the best way to go.