external HD - PC/MAC compatible...?!

E

eyedea

Registered
Hi everyone ;)

just wondering if anyone could solve this problem...recently got an external HD, put together from a laptop HD and a case, firewire connection.
One of the reasons to get this was to be able to transport larger chunks of files around, for both PC and MAC.
> initally formatted for DOS, it worked fine for both PC and MAC - but too slow.
> then I tried NTFS which I was told should be the perfect solution - fine for the PC, MAC thougth will only read, can't write to it....

Someone now mentioned someting about UNIX which I don't know enough about....
anyone have any ideas on this....? would be very much appreciated ;)
 
you should be able to format it FAT32. The reason NTFS is only read-only is because while FAT 32 developer information was made available to developers, NTFS information has been scarce, thanks mainly to Microsoft. Because of this, the open-source community has had to write an NTFS driver from scratch, which means that it's taken a lot longer than it should have. Read-only access has finally been included as stable, but write access is still a bit dangerous (I got this information right from the Linux kernel when I was compiling one for a box).

You probably would be better off either using FAT (which is more compatible) or FAT32 (which makes better use of blocks and is still compatible with other operating systems).
 
Thanks for that ;)
I just don't really understand enough about these formats... I will give it a go... fingers crossed ;)

Thanks again :)
 
Another solution is to stick to hfs (mac os extended journaled or not) and install MacDrive 5 on PC. However, not all PCs would have it so you need to go through the hassle of installing such a thing.
 
thanks ;)

that would be defeating its purpose somehow.... I'd like to remain flexible, not having to rely on the PCs to be set up for it. I'm mostly on a mac - but taking files around to clients who might be on PC - without any extra hassle.... but thanks anyway ;)
 
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