[robbennett]

Hi I am very new to the Mac world Ive done pcs for years. I DJ and have been doing it with PC but I am not satisfied with the performance everybody said I needed to go to mac. So I picked up an ibook yesterday to try it out it has OSX 10.1.5 on it. My Problem is I have a 300gb NTFS drive full of my music the MAC cant recognize without formatting it there is now way I am doing that. I grabbed a 250gb drive and formatted it but the PC cannot recognize it without formatting it. I need to find some way to transfer these songs to another drive it would take to many dvds to burn 300gb and it is very frustrating. I can ping the MAC but cannot access it in the network I cannot ping the PC nor connect to it.
any help would be greatly appreciated I feel like chucking this out the window
thanks
Rob
<email hidden for privacy>

[mduell]

OS X can read, but not write, NTFS, so you should be fine there. Windows can't read or write HFS. Use FAT32 for cross-platform compatibility.

If you're in search of performance, an ancient iBook is an odd choice of hardware.

[Sherman Homan]

ditto mduell, before you spend any more money on any more hardware, you need to ask yourself if a newer Mac laptop wouldn't fix a whole lotta problems. Easy networking, file transfers, large drive support, etc. And OS 10.1 is just plain not ready for prime time.

[robbennett]

It would be great if I could get it to see it but it says it cannot recognize it and wants to format it. Least if it could read only the songs I could copy them but it wont see any part of it and xp will only let me format it NTFS and fat 32 will not see 300gb

[C.A.T.S. CEO]

OS 10.1 may not recognize NTFS, being so old. What are the specs of the iBook? You could try putting 10.3 on it.

PS: A word of advice: DON'T title threads as 'help', use a more descriptive title so we will knoiw right away that we can help you so we don't waste our time, also don't refer to a Mac as MAC, MAC means Media Access Control and Mac means Macintosh. Don't put your email address on this forum, all you're going to get is a bunch of spam.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by C.A.T.S. CEO 

PS: A word of advice: DON'T title threads as 'help', use a more descriptive title so we will know right away that we can help you so we don't waste our time,

We even have a rule to that effect-I'll fix the thread title for you.

Originally Posted by C.A.T.S. CEO 

also don't refer to a Mac as MAC, MAC means Media Access Control and Mac means Macintosh. Don't put your email address on this forum, all you're going to get is a bunch of spam.

Both valid points. A MAC is the hardware serial number of an ethernet device like a network card. And posting an email address is just inviting spam by the bushel. I'll edit that for you too. Keep your eye out for a Private Message instead-that's done through the forums and doesn't reveal anything about you to the world that you don't want revealed.

[Sherman Homan]

Do not use Windows to format a 300 gig drive in FAT32! His Highness, William Gates, has crippled that. You will end up with 9 32 gig partitions. The Mac will impose no such limitation, you could reformat it at 300 gigs in FAT32 on a Mac, once you have copied it to another drive.

[ghporter]

Sherman, there ARE utilities that can format a FAT32 drive all the way up to the theoretical max of around 8 terabytes. But they aren't part of the Win2K or XP installers (basically the same executable), so most people believe that there's no way to do it within Windows. I think you CAN do it with the Disk Management plugin, but for most people, even getting to that is a pain.

Fortunately Disk Utility can (I think, anyway) format any size FAT32 partition.

[Sherman Homan]

From a quick look at Microsoft's support site:
Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP
it looks like the 32 gig limit is a 'feature' of XP. You can use the standard Format tool in both Windows 98 and ME to create FAT drives up to 8 terabytes. How weird is that? An actual function for Windows ME?!

[ghporter]

XP grew out of Win2K, not the 9X family-and Microsoft's left hand was obviously not talking to its right when they developed XP, or they'd have fixed this particular issue. You're right-it's complete rubbish for it to be this way. That's Redmond for you.