Location: Hanover, NH
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This is a question for all of you technologically magical nightlifers...
I just got an 120 gig firewire hard drive for Christmas. I want to use the drive to shuttle data between my PC and Mac. I'm looking for a file system that both Mac OS and Winblows can read and write.
I've used portable drives before and have found that NTFS is not the right format for my needs. My PC can work with it just fine, but the Mac is only able to read and copy files from an NTFS drive. The Mac cannot write to an NTFS volume because that's the way NTFS is.
I've also used small usb flash memory drives between both platforms with much sucess. However, those drives are formated with MS's old FAT file system. While both platforms can read and write, volumes that are formated in FAT are limited to 2gigs in size. This isn't good because my external drive is 120...
Then there's FAT 32...same deal as FAT: both platforms can read and write, but volumes are limited to 32 gigs in size.
I have also tried paritioning the drive in half. 60 gigs dedicated to NTFS, and the other 60 dedicated to Mac OS's system. I first tried creating the NTFS partition on the PC, then hooking the drive up to the Mac to format the remaining space. I think the Mac OS's Disk Utility could only recognize and play with the NTFS portion of the drive. It did not recognize the unallocated space I wanted to use for the Mac file system.
Next i tried putting the Mac file system partition first. Using disk utility I created 2 partitions, the first for Mac's file system and I left as free space. I then connected the drive to my PC to format the remaning partition. To my dissapointment, the PC failed to recognize the Mac partition, and saw the drive as completely empty and unformatted.
As a schwilly workaround, I created 3 partitions on the drive. I made 2 32 gig partitions in FAT 32 so that both platforms could have full access, and then i formated the remaining space in NTFS since I need more HD space for my PC.
I can live with this workaround for a while, but i really want to be able to format half the disk to Mac's format, and the other half in NTFS. Ideallly I can use a filesystem that is friendly to both platforms, but i don't see that happening anytime.
Any suggestions?
_________________ Suburban
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