[EthanG]

Hello, I am obviously new here. I am also new to working with macs, and I have been running into a few problems with them. Maybe someone might be able to help me out?

I have a PC at home (for games and fun) and I use a mac at the labs at school. I have a SmartDisk Crossfire 250gb (really only like 207gb after format) and I am working with large video files. I store them on the drive at the lab, but I would also like to come home and have a back up file on my pc.

When I bought the drive I formatted it for windows under the NTSF format. I then went to the lab at school and the mac OS (I believe it was OS 10.4.3 or something close) would only let me read files off of the drive, but not write to them. I then had the lab tech format it for mac os (she had to use her password: as a lonely punk student, I'm not trustworthy). I was then able to read and write files to and from the drive.

Yet, now that I am back home, I am not able to access the drive at all; it will not mount and windows doesn't give me a any messages about it at all.

Any suggestions on how to use this product between both OS's would be very helpful.

Thank you!
-Ethan.

[spice003]

there is this software called macdrive you install it in windows it lets you see mac drives/files and if i'm not mistaking it lets you write to the drive. yep just checked it lets you move files back and forth..
i use it my self on a macbook pro. here is the link

Mediafour | MacDrive 6

[mduell]

The only partition format that can be read and written to on both platforms is FAT32; unfortunately it has a 4GB file size limit.

The next-best solution is to format it as HFS+ as you have, and use MacDrive or similar on Windows to access the drive.

[spice003]

its time they came up with a new partition so we can read/write on mac and pc.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by spice003 

its time they came up with a new partition so we can read/write on mac and pc.

Microsoft unfortunately doesn't play nice here. FAT32 is the best solution available today. It wouldn't be very hard to include drivers for HFS+ or any other filesystem (say ReiserFS or ext2 for Linux), but they intentionally don't do that.

They also don't publish details on NTFS so that third parties can develop filesystem drivers for alternative operating systems.

[ghporter]

I too like the idea of a common drive format that supports large files, journaling, and so on... But that's not something that I personally have the time to develop (step 1-learn everything about the current drive formats; step 2-analyze all their algorithms...).

What would be GREAT would be a third party, (IEEE?) standardized format that the market pressures both MS and Apple to support properly. Sort of like UDF but more flexible and suited to hard drives...

Ok, I'm back in the real world now.

[hickey]

Originally Posted by mduell 

The only partition format that can be read and written to on both platforms is FAT32; unfortunately it has a 4GB file size limit...

What do you mean by the 4GB limit? Can it only write 4GBs at a time during file transfers?

I ask because I just got a Fat32 drive from my school, and I may need to use it on pc's and macs.

[ghporter]

Here's a good resource for understanding the limitations of the FAT32 file system. Basically, because of the way files are indexed and referenced, the largest file allowable in a FAT32 system is 4GB. When the FAT32 system was developed, that was a ludicrously large file, so don't be too hard on the file system's designers.

FAT32 is very useful for a lot of things, but it DOES have limitations. I reiterate my dream list in my post above-a third-party, universally supported file system that worked with flash drives, hard drives, and everything else is THE ideal, particularly if it's an international, "Microsoft can't 'extend it'" kind of standard.