Getting my Mac to R/W a PC-formatted USB drive

W

waspking

Registered
I am trying to use a USB/Firewire disk to move files between PC and Mac. If I format the drive on my iMac G5 (Pather), even in "DOS format", the PC would not see it.

Now I formatted it in PC (win XP, NTFS) and my Mac can see it, but can only read. It says it cannot modified if I trie to copy files into it. Volume info says "You can only read" under Ownerships and Permissions... I have tried to enable sharing on the PC, but this did not seem to help at all.

On the PC it write fine! strange. This is should be simple enough that I donot need a software to do this?

thanks for any help.

Zach
 
NTFS is read-only under Mac OS X. You cannot write to an NTFS-formatted volume under Mac OS X.

If you want to be able to read and write both on the Macintosh and the Windows computer, format the drive as FAT32.
 
For the record, NTFS support is still read-only even on other UNIX and Unix like systems like Linux, FreeBSD, etc. FAT32 however is well supported and is read-write on all operating systems as far as I know.
 
Thanks for all the replies...I figured that out eventually... another question: even under FAT32, my mac can write to it, but all the date stamps are changed to the time of copying, rather than the original date of creation....

is this a Mac bug? if the disc is formatted as a Mac OS, then the date stamps are correct... strange!

I also found that Fat32 does not support more than 34 gig or something... above that the XP would change to NTFS only. took me another few days to find that out.
 
Wasp

Format the drive on the mac using disc utilities, FAT32 can be up to 800gb it's just that windows kept it at 32gb as it's not the best file management under fat 32. Anyway format it for DOS under disc utilities, I done this with a Maxtor 300gb and works like a charm.,

Anyway another question, if you're transferring files between PC and mac, why not use a router and turn on file sharing for windows on the mac, I've mac & pc side by side here, though I use wireless between the 2 if you used a wired connection (crossover if no router) they'd copy really quickly.


nialler
 
Nialler,
Thanks for the help. I use a Mac at work and there is a pc at home, hence it would be easier to bring a portable HD than sharing through the network.

My disk util only formats one PC mode: "Dos format" and I tried on both my G3 powerbook (10.2) and my iMac G5 (10.3), neither gets recognized at all by any PC... (yet flash cards or usb flash formatted on mac can be seen on PC) are you using Tiger? maybe it has more dos options.
 
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