Pc??

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digiman77

Registered
Hi!

I just bought a PeeCee for games and music as i to use my Quicksilver G4 for Pro video editing and DVD authouring only. I have a 200gb firedisk with all my music and digitalphotos on, it is formatet in Mac OS Extended format ( not Journaled ). My question is will my PC be able to read this disk? I want PC itunes to be able to acess my music libary on the disk.

Thanks Stuart
 
The simple answer is: No, your PC will refuse to read your HFS extended format drive. There's other threads here that discuss setting up external HDs for shared use.
 
I believe there is software that can read older Apple formats, back when I needed to read some Mac floppies on my PC. Best bet is to probably format the external as FAT32 for best compatibility all around.
 
I remember finding a piece of software that allowed you to mount mac hd's (inc fw) on a pc, though i never used it. Its called MacDrive (look here: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/). As I remember it would only read fat32 disks, and there was a limit to the size of drive it could mount of 32gb as a result.

hope this helps (though you'd have reformat the drive to make it work)
 
Thanks!

The disk i am useing is a LaCie 200Gb Firewire. How do i format to Fat 32? In Windows? I guess i have to back my stuff and format and reinstall everything on the disk. Does OSX read Fat32 ok?

Stuart
 
Recently, I bought the macdrive software and I have no problems with it. Basically it is "just" a driver which enables Windows to read/ write HFS/HFS+ formated media, including all sorts of CDs, DVDs, hard discs and floppies (ipods too)
I never encountered any "size" limit (I've successfully mounted a HFS+ formated Lacie FW disk - 40 GB on my WinXP machine).

..remember it would only read fat32 disks, and there was a limit to the size of drive it could mount of 32gb as a result.
Click to expand...

Huh, I don't know what are you talking about. As I already stated, macdrive is a product to read/write HFS formated media with a PC (Windows OS).

If you don't want to buy this software you could format you FW disk to fat32 (using your Windows OS). OSX can read/write fat32 formated media (but can't format media to fat32 by itself). But this sollution also means you have to backup your stuff first...
 
Ifrit said:
If you don't want to buy this software you could format you FW disk to fat32 (using your Windows OS). OSX can read/write fat32 formated media (but can't format media to fat32 by itself). But this sollution also means you have to backup your stuff first...
Click to expand...

I'd have to wonder what kind of read / write times you're going to get in this scenario.

With the mac not doing its thang in its native tongue could cause quite a hit on disk performance...
 
Ifrit said:
Huh, I don't know what are you talking about. As I already stated, macdrive is a product to read/write HFS formated media with a PC (Windows OS).
Click to expand...

It was quite a while ago that i looked at macdrive, so i assume it was an earlier version. I was told about the 32gb limit by someone who was using it at their company, so i can only assume its become more effective since then.
 
I'd have to wonder what kind of read / write times you're going to get in this scenario.

With the mac not doing its thang in its native tongue could cause quite a hit on disk performance...
Click to expand...

It is supported natively by OSX so I don't believe thre is a huge performance drop.

But I have to warn you, fat32 formated disk don't support certain HFS/HFS+ features. Moving and coping applications for examble works while using a fat32 formated disk and OSX. But if you copy/move mac applications in Windows XP (also on the fat32 formated disk) you most likly detroy these application in the process or render them unuseable. (Most likley they loose their "tags" which basically tells OSX that this file is an executable). So the fat32 sollution is just for storing, using/sharing various document files beetween the two operating systems.
 
That's right. File icons, comments and the like would be disposed of by FAT32.

Worse still, if you place an old OS 9 application on a FAT32 volume, it may well not work again as the resource fork would be flung as well...
 
And thats the reason Apple decided against including the "format to fat32" option. BTW fat32 is a horrible outdated format, fat32 formated media also needs to be defragmented time to time. I believe HFS/HFS+ takes care about the fragmentation by itself (or at least the mac OS does)
 
Damn!

That's the one I was looking for .. because I posted in it [duh!]

Nice one!..
 
Hehe... took me a second or two to find that one -- a search for "defrag" wouldn't show that thread to me, but a search for "optimize" did... strange!
 
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