Question for the IT Peeps (Mac/PC drive compatibility)

[Waldo]

OK, so it's too late at night for me to reach Maxtor's tech support, so I'm coming to the next best source: The brilliant minds of STR!

I use a Windows laptop running XP Home Ed (SP2) and also have an old Mac G4/400 running OS 10.2.8. I recently bought a Maxtor 320GB external USB hard drive for backup purposes. I'd like to back up files from both comps to this drive, but I can only get one or the other to recognize the drive. Windows saw it right away, but the Mac will only see it if I partition or format the drive using Disc Uitility. If I do that, then Windows won't see it until I reformat it there!

I've used other external drives that can be seen on both machines, even humble USB flash drives. Not sure what I'm missing this time around. I used to be good at this stuff, but I'm getting rusty. Any help?

[LBmtb]

Without checking what filesystems that version of OSX supports I would say reformat the drive using fat32. It should be usable by both the PC & mac at that point. I'm guessing the drive is NTFS right now.

[Waldo]

Originally Posted by LBmtb

Without checking what filesystems that version of OSX supports I would say reformat the drive using fat32. It should be usable by both the PC & mac at that point. I'm guessing the drive is NTFS right now.

Wow, that was fast!
Now let me see if I can figure out what you mean by all that!

[LBmtb]

You can use the Mac's disk utility app (applications > utilities > Disk Utility) to convert it so Fat32 format. Connect it and choose to erase it. Choose MS-DOS as the filesystem.

I forget what tool you use under windows . . .

[JoeTruth]

Originally Posted by Waldo

OK, so it's too late at night for me to reach Maxtor's tech support, so I'm coming to the next best source: The brilliant minds of STR!

I use a Windows laptop running XP Home Ed (SP2) and also have an old Mac G4/400 running OS 10.2.8. I recently bought a Maxtor 320GB external USB hard drive for backup purposes. I'd like to back up files from both comps to this drive, but I can only get one or the other to recognize the drive. Windows saw it right away, but the Mac will only see it if I partition or format the drive using Disc Uitility. If I do that, then Windows won't see it until I reformat it there!

I've used other external drives that can be seen on both machines, even humble USB flash drives. Not sure what I'm missing this time around. I used to be good at this stuff, but I'm getting rusty. Any help?

[SIZE=3]If they're in any way networked (wired preferably), put the external drive on the Windows box and create a share either by sharing the whole drive or create a folder and share it (be sure your firewall has rule enabling file/print sharing, otherwise, it won't see the PC). Then from your Mac, navigate to that Windows PC and access the shared folder. Once there, simply drag and drop all the files you want. For some reason, it's much easier for Mac's to access networked PC's vs. the other way around. Not sure if that's what you had in mind but there's my 2 cents worth. Good luck!


[/SIZE]

[LBmtb]

Joe brings up a good point about using a home network. If you wanna be really cool you'll get an airport extreme to use as your wireless router and simply plugin your hard drive to that. It instantly becomes a network share accessible from both the PC and Mac

[JoeTruth]

Originally Posted by LBmtb

Joe brings up a good point about using a home network. If you wanna be really cool you'll get an airport extreme to use as your wireless router and simply plugin your hard drive to that. It instantly becomes a network share accessible from both the PC and Mac

[SIZE=3]Big points for cool factor but when you go wireless, unless your feet from the wireless router, you're not going to get anywhere near the throughput as you would with a 100 Mbs. or even better, a 1 GB switch. I transfer files all the time between wireless PC's and so long as they're not huge, it's fine. But if I'm backing up images, PST files, docs, XLS files, etc., it's going through a wired connection. How about screw all of the above and go with Mozy? Free online backups up to 2 GB's and unlimited backups for $4.95 a month. Secured 448 bit encryption. Good stuff, I use it daily and I don't do a thing. It's runs when the system is idle and does incremental backups. Good stuff! They weren't Mac compatible up until very recently. Now they have a Mac Beta download.

Edit: I see. If the USB drive is connected the Airport Extreme and he's connected wired to the router, than transfer rate would be up to par. I didn't realize the Extreme had a USB port. That is cool and I'm a dork!




[/SIZE]

[sladnas]

Use disk utility to create two partitions--one of which will be the HFS Journaled, case in-sensitive (if you want default values)...

Once you do that, plug it into Windows and format the other partition as NTFS for use with Windows.

If you use FAT32 for storing Mac files, you have the potential of losing a lot of meta data associated with the files which don't necessarily show up when you look at it in Finder. FAT32 also doesn't support the older "forked" resource files that Mac used (but it is no longer standard). Again, this translated to data loss.

BTW, I use this exact scenario for doing occasional bootable backups of the Mac (using SuperDuper) and of my wife's Windows laptop (using Norton Ghost).

edit: Even though you are splitting the drive between the two, your Mac will be able to read the entire disk. You just can't write to the NTFS partition from your Mac. The PC won't be able to read the Mac partition however.

[el_d00der1n0]

OSX has mount doesn't it? If you can go to /mnt/, create a folder /mnt/hdwhatever, the command should go something like this:

 
mount -t msdos /dev/hdX /mnt/hdwhatever

The man page for mount: http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount

[LBmtb]

It has mount but you almost never have to use the command line for things like that. Mac is more of a *true* plug and play OS than Windows or Linux. (I ran linux for almost two years as my only desktop at home before going to the mac)

[nappyt]

Originally Posted by LBmtb

Without checking what filesystems that version of OSX supports I would say reformat the drive using fat32. It should be usable by both the PC & mac at that point. I'm guessing the drive is NTFS right now.

Per Mac the FAT32 format is what they recommend with OS X. But did Windows they fix the limit for FAT32? I don't use that anymore except on thumb drives. I think when XP came out 32 GB partition was the largest Windows would make. I'm not sure maybe its changed.

Originally Posted by JoeTruth

[SIZE=3]If they're in any way networked (wired preferably), put the external drive on the Windows box and create a share either by sharing the whole drive or create a folder and share it (be sure your firewall has rule enabling file/print sharing, otherwise, it won't see the PC). Then from your Mac, navigate to that Windows PC and access the shared folder. Once there, simply drag and drop all the files you want. For some reason, it's much easier for Mac's to access networked PC's vs. the other way around. Not sure if that's what you had in mind but there's my 2 cents worth. Good luck!


[/SIZE]

If you can wire it to your network that would be the best method for using it with both MAC and PC. I know Linksys has a router with a couple USB 2.0 ports cheap. I would stay away from wireless unless its WiMax. None the new stuff is very fast for doing something like backups even "N".

[LBmtb]

I"m pretty sure it's been fixed - my last external that I bought was a 160gb an was FAT32. My friend was able to hook it up to his windows laptop just fine when we copied some stuff back and forth. Of course that was before I reformatted it with a real filesystem

Since you mention wired hookup - the router I mentioned (airport extreme) not only has N wireless but also gigabit ethernet (only three ports though). But of course he would need a gigabit nic and I doubt the G3 would have one. Not sure about his windows computer.

[nappyt]

Originally Posted by Waldo

OK, so it's too late at night for me to reach Maxtor's tech support, so I'm coming to the next best source: The brilliant minds of STR!

I use a Windows laptop running XP Home Ed (SP2) and also have an old Mac G4/400 running OS 10.2.8. I recently bought a Maxtor 320GB external USB hard drive for backup purposes. I'd like to back up files from both comps to this drive, but I can only get one or the other to recognize the drive. Windows saw it right away, but the Mac will only see it if I partition or format the drive using Disc Uitility. If I do that, then Windows won't see it until I reformat it there!

I've used other external drives that can be seen on both machines, even humble USB flash drives. Not sure what I'm missing this time around. I used to be good at this stuff, but I'm getting rusty. Any help?

If you get it working make sure to do backups regularly and check them. Really check them by doing a recovery drill. I was a consultant back in the day and the majority of people didn't backup. The ones that did either didn't verify the backups or didn't have a way to restore them.

If your OS of choice has a backup tool built-in read what it does. Most aren't that great (not positive about MAC) Also know the process that you need to follow to recover.

If time is an issue look into things like Ghost and SuperDuper. It can mean the difference between getting up and running in 15 minutes or 6 hours.

Good luck...

[LBmtb]

Good point, nappy. Here's a solid free backup app for the mac: http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html that waldo can use.

k . . . I rambled on enough in this thread. I should shut up now

[Waldo]

Thanks everybody! I think I followed about 68.4% of all that, but I'm pretty sure that when I'm at home tonight sitting in front of it that will all make sense (almost).

Big duh to myself for not even thinking to plug the drive into my wifi router. Where was my brain?! Sorry G: Airport Extreme would be cool, but that's also a couple of bills that I could put towards new lights or a Garmin Edge or some other fun bike stuff.

Thanks also for the info on backup apps - I hadn't got as far as searching for those yet. I honestly don't care much about system backups: There's nothing so unique about either of my systems that I couldn't pretty quickly re-install from scratch if needed. For that matter, if the Mac died, it'd get parted out on Craigslist. Love the Mac, but that's a pretty old, tired one, and daddy needs more bikes!

[LBmtb]

I knew I said I wouldn't ramble in this thread anymore but . . . you can't plug your hard drive into your router unless you have the airport extreme. The airport extreme is the only router that can do that (as far as I know).

[JoeTruth]

Originally Posted by LBmtb

I knew I said I wouldn't ramble in this thread anymore but . . . you can't plug your hard drive into your router unless you have the airport extreme. The airport extreme is the only router that can do that (as far as I know).

[SIZE=3] Linksys has one (as do others)...[/SIZE]
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satel...=6784839789B06
[SIZE=3] About a $100.00. Not terrible considering. If you're itching to part with more money, then the Airport Extreme would be best.[/SIZE]

[mtnbikej]

Oh, my god......what a bunch of computer geeks.






















J/k