[imedgeyourenot]

i recently just wiped my external f/w drive. put what i needed on a pc because it was the only computer handy. i reformated/partitioned my external so that i may put osx on it because the HD in my ibook died. and now i want to put back the files that i put on the pc back onto the drive. i hooked it up and it to the pc and now it wont read the drive. is there anything that i can do to get my files back on the drive without have to use like 80 cd-rs?
any help will be great.. thank you

[hudson1]

You mentioned that you repartioned the FW drive. Am I to assmume that you have at least two partions on the drive? If so, you can reformat the partion that doesn't contain OS X as FAT32. This should allow the PC to use that partion once you've gone into the hardware manager and designated that partion as readable or something like that (don't have my PC in front of me at this moment). From there, copy the files from your PC to that partition and then reconnect to your Mac and copy back over.

[imedgeyourenot]

nope just has the one partition. taking up all 160g's of it

[brickcam]

Consider partioning it in two, then. Seems logical.

[WoD]

I am pretty sure that HFS and Fat32 partitions can not exist on the same drive.

You can use MacDisk - www.macdisk.com
or
MadDrive - www.macdrive.com

to read/write a Mac partitioned disk under Windows.

If you find another program that does the same trick for free, give me a shout - I currently have 250gb split into 2 fat32 (it is my understanding that OSX only supports up to 128gb fat32, but I might be wrong). I would much prefer the whole drive formatted as HFS+ for better performance with my mini, but both macdisk and macdrive are expensive.

[brickcam]

Different solution: why don't you chain the three computers so that the pc talks to your mac which is hooked up to the ext harddrive? Maybe then you could send the data directly. (?)

[WoD]

Using ethernet that would be slow, using wireless ethernet that would be SLOW.

Even on USB 1.1 it takes only a couple of minutes to copy about 4gb of music onto an external Firewire formatted as HFS+. Over network that could be half an hour plus, at a wild guess.

imedgeyourenot, You could easily just use the free 30 day trial of MacDrive to get your files over- which is what I decided to do in the end. Yesterday I formatted my external Firewire as Mac OS X Extended and re-copied some of my media onto it.

After actually trying out MacDrive is is quite incredible, it does not seem to affect the speed at all and you could just as well be copying to Fat32. The whole system is quite seemless, although MacDrive is still running there in the background. If your external drive has no residual Fat32 partition data on it (mine did) it should just appear in My Computer, otherwise it will prompt you to specify if it is a Mac or Win disk.. specifying Mac cleans the rogue partition data off the drive and you end up with your Mac formatted disk in My Computer as if it were a regular windows drive.

When you think about it, there is no reason for MacDrive to be slow or perform badly - a filesystem driver is a filesystem drive.. XP has to "drive" NTFS and Fat32, why should HFS+ be any slower.

I also tried MacDisk, it is far less "intrusive" than MacDrive, and does not bury itself into your system and run constantly. It does the job just as well but does not have the fantastic integration of MacDrive which makes all the difference. I could not test the speed as MacDisk trial does not let you copy files >1mb (sucks to that)

MacDisk, in my opinion, would be the better solution if you wanted to take your external around and copy data on/off other peoples windows machines- it is more contained than MacDrive and less likely, I think, to screw anything up.

If you skipped the above (I have a habit of rattling on) then the solution: Get MacDrive and use the 30day trial to copy over your data. Then ditch it.