Originally posted by heroine:
hi.
i have an external firewire drive that i was planning on using to backup my pc's and g4 laptop.
problem - when i plug it into my g4 tibook it won't allow me to move anything from the laptop drive to the external. when i click "get info" on the external, it shows me that i only have read permissions on the external, and therefore cannot copy anything. i also see the drive is formatted, i believe, in windows format.
do i need a specific format for the drive to work on pc's and macs?
is there any way to change the permissions on the drive while plugged into the mac?
external drive is a seagate, with....i forgot the company name of the enclosure. laptop is a g4 tibook, with panther.
any help would be much appreciated.
thanks in advanced.
daniel.
If the drive is formatted as NTFS (from Windows), the Mac will mount it as read-only. Nothing you can do about that.
If it's formatted as FAT32, then you can mount and use it read/write from both file systems.
How large is the drive? If it's > 100 GB, formatting it as FAT32 is a fairly stinky option, as it's *very* inefficient (no real need to go into details -- just know a 1 KB text file will take up like 64 KB on a 100 GB FAT32 volume -- what a waste of space).
The *easiest* way to share a volume between Mac and Windows is to format it from the Mac as HFS+, and then install MacDrive 6 on the PC. I did this for a couple years, and never had a problem, it worked great. Only drawback here is it costs $50. It was worth it to me, but not everyone feels the same way.
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