Windows can't see my external hard drive?

[Ciel Noir]

Hello everyone!

I've just installed Windows on my MacBook with Boot Camp. I decided to format the disk NTFS instead of FAT because everyone says NTFS is safer and more reliable. The problem is, I can't seem to use my external hard drive when using Windows, and can't copy files from Mac OS to the Windows disk because NTFS is read-only. There are some pretty big files I have on my MacBook that I want to use in Windows.

The external drive is a Western Digital "My Book".

Sorry if this is a really stupid question but is there a way of using my hard drive in both Mac OS and Windows? If not is my only option of transferring data from one OS to the other to reinstall Windows as a FAT drive or to use DVD-Rs?

 

[spinnerlys]

http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems

MacDrive for reading and writing to HFS+ formatted volumes in Windows.

NTFS-3G to write to NTFS formatted volumes in Mac OS X.

Also MRoogle is a good tool to search this board, as your question comes up everyonce in a while.

 

[quantum003]

FAT32 format can be read by both windows and Mac. NTFS is the format for windows startup disks so perhaps that is part of the problem?

 

[Ciel Noir]

MacDrive was the answer! I got it and now I can take anything from my Mac folders while in Windows and copy it to that partition. Thank you so much for your help Spinnerlys!

Quantum, I think that is the problem. But with MacDrive I don't think there's any point in having a FAT32 Windows partition.