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beni · Nov 12, 2003, 12:26 PM

Hi,
I want to transfer a large amount of data from my Mac to a friend's PC (Around 50Gb). I was wondering if it is possible to buy a hard disc, fill it on my Mac, and then install it in the PC.

I realise that formating it with hfs+ would make it useless on the PC. Is it possible to format it as FAT32 or ntfs or whatever these PCs use, and then stick it in my mac and start copying?

Any thoughts?

SMacTech · Nov 12, 2003, 12:34 PM

Unless you store the files as images, those files that have resource forks will be useless. FAT32 cannot deal with them. I use my XP box as a backup solution, but the files are stored as images. Being an image file, it is also much quicker to copy and burn to the DVD in the PC.

teszeract · Nov 12, 2003, 06:31 PM

macdrive

jasong · Nov 12, 2003, 08:12 PM

Well, since we are talking about OS X, The resource fork issue may not be an issue. As long as your word documents have a .doc extension, and your Acrobat documents have a .pdf, then yes, you can format the drive as a Fat32 in your Mac, copy the files and then run them on your Windows box.

Also, it should be said that the images SMacTech is talking about are disk images, not images like gif and jpeg.

-- Jason

beni · Nov 13, 2003, 08:20 AM

Originally posted by jasong:
Well, since we are talking about OS X, The resource fork issue may not be an issue. As long as your word documents have a .doc extension, and your Acrobat documents have a .pdf, then yes, you can format the drive as a Fat32 in your Mac, copy the files and then run them on your Windows box.

Also, it should be said that the images SMacTech is talking about are disk images, not images like gif and jpeg.

-- Jason

Thanks everyone!
The resource forks are not important. How would I go about formating a drive as Fat32 in Os X?

ngrundy · Nov 13, 2003, 08:32 AM

Disk Utility has the option to format to MS-DOS or something like that, can't remember off the top of my head, select that when you set the new drives partitions up and it will format to fat 32

beni · Nov 13, 2003, 09:58 AM

Originally posted by ngrundy:
Disk Utility has the option to format to MS-DOS or something like that, can't remember off the top of my head, select that when you set the new drives partitions up and it will format to fat 32

Thank's! I will give it a try!

SMacTech · Nov 13, 2003, 10:11 AM

Originally posted by jasong:

Also, it should be said that the images SMacTech is talking about are disk images, not images like gif and jpeg.

-- Jason

Thanks for clarifying that Jason, my bad!