Can a Mac and a PC share the same partition?

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I wantd to get an external HD to boost the storage on my Mac. If I got a firewire drive, how should I format it so that it can be read/written by Win XP and Mac OS X?

The ideal situation would be so that I could share my MP3's/photos between the two machine on the same partition.

Is this possible?
 
This is not possible. My recommendation for you on sharing your MP3s, would be to purchase the 2nd drive for either your Mac or your Windows box, I guess for whichever one you thought you might get the most use out of.

Next, you will want to make sure they are both connected via Ethernet between the two, then just do file sharing between them. This way, whatever direction you go, both systems will be able to share. Because the way the Mac is built, it would be easier to set them on Windows platform, and connect to them from the Mac, instead of the other way.

Admin
 
Darn - I just got back from CompUSA with an AcomData 120GB firewire/USB 2.0 external drive (great deal by the way for $200 after rebates).

So, there's no way to format this thing to be read/written by both machines? How about partitioning it for each system? i guess that negates the point of getting a firewire and USB drive...
 
Im not saying you can't partition the drive for both systems... but doing so you neglect the fact you want to be able to share MP3s between systems. You won't be able to copy files between those partitions.
 
Thanks for the input folks. Not that I disbelieved you, buy after some more digging around, I read that OS X will support a FAT32 partition. The article at Apple.com/support seems to support this notion.

So, if I format the HD on the PC using FAT32, I should be able to read/write it in OS X.

Has anybody tried this? I thought I would check before wasting my afternoon doing this!
 
I've seen this work fine plenty of times with zip and jaz disks, there's no reason it shouldn't scale to a large firewire drive.

You could also get software on the PC side to mount HFS+ volumes. There is definately commercial software that does this, and there may be [free|share]ware alternatives as well. (A look at tucows is probably worth your time.

In short, this is very do-able.

-alex
 
Not sure if this is worthy of a listing under FAQ's, but this definitely works.

I formatted the external HD using FAT32 and it now mounts quite happily on both the iMac and the Win XP machine.

The drive I am using in has both Firewire and USB2.0 connections and works a treat.

Awesome!!
 
I'm glad you went ahead and did it, chorus of naysayers aside. This has worked since ~System 7.5, and it even worked in 10.0 (IIRC).
I would have thought that this doesn't need to be in the FAQ since everybody knows you can read/write FAT32 partitions on a mac, but apparently....

Anyway, good to hear it works for you!

-alex.
 
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