Maxtor II external hard drive going to winxp

[imac abuser]

I have a Maxtor II eternal hard drive I use for saving files on my mac. I store all my ipod ready movies and stuff on there. My brother who uses winxp wanted my movies so I took my drive over, and it will not work any ideas why? It sees the drive but wont open or do anything. I dont remember formating the drive for mac any ideas?

 

[yellow]

Because Windows cannot read/see HFS+. If your brother wants to see it, he needs to puchase MacDrive, or you need to erase the HD and reformat it as FAT32 so you can both read/write to it. However, FAT32 has a 4GB single file limit.

 

[imac abuser]

what's macdrive a virtual pc type thing?

 

[yellow]

No. It's an application that allows Windows to see/read/write/format to HFS+ drives.

 

[hanshanzi]

maxtor, mac, winxp

I have the opposite problem described in the earlier email. I have a new Maxtor III that is NT-formatted and it seems to work with my pc laptops so far (Dell and Sony). But when I connect it to my iMac, its icon appears but I cannot add any files to it. I am told it is "read only." Is there some way to reset the drive so it can be read on both the Mac and the PC as a fully usable external drive?

hanshanzi

 

[YS2003]

MacDrive should work as the previous poster said. I use it for my PCs. My portable HDs are formatted for MacIntosh. When I need to copy over MS Office files to my PC, I just plug in the HD to my PC and MacDrive does it magic and I can just drag and copy. Or, rather, I use Sync Toy from MS so that my PC updates the files I updated with my Mac.

 

[yellow]

I have the opposite problem described in the earlier email. I have a new Maxtor III that is NT-formatted and it seems to work with my pc laptops so far (Dell and Sony). But when I connect it to my iMac, its icon appears but I cannot add any files to it. I am told it is "read only." Is there some way to reset the drive so it can be read on both the Mac and the PC as a fully usable external drive?

OS X xan only read NTFS volumes.

The drive must be reformatted as FAT32 for both Windows and OS X to read/write to it, but it has inherant limitations then, such as a 4GB single file limit.

OR

The drive can be formatted as HFS+ and you puchase MacDrive for your Windows boxes to read/write to it.