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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Consumer Hardware & Components > external HD file limit?

external HD file limit?
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tws
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May 4, 2007, 08:49 PM
 
forum folks,

i recently got a OWC mercury elite pro 500GB external drive to mount with both my PC p4 and my new macbookpro laptop...

i formatted the drive to be fat 32 so both OS could read/write to it.

everything has been going fine - with the exception of the presistant DStore files that litter the drive and are only seen by the pc machine.

today i tried to copy from my PC several .ISO files (4.3gigs) to the external drive and was presented with the error msg 'file to large' insufficent room on drive. (i have 265GB left)

i fear this error is the result of formatting in fat 32.

is there any kind of workaround that i can perform to save these large ISO files to my external data drive?

thanks for your patience and help.

tws
     
Seattle
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May 4, 2007, 09:05 PM
 
You are right is it a file size limit with Fat32. 4 Gigabyte file size is the max.
     
mduell
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May 4, 2007, 09:23 PM
 
Reformat as NTFS (which will erase all your data!), Windows can read it natively, and OS X can read it with MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.
     
jasong
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May 4, 2007, 09:49 PM
 
mduell, do you mean it can write to it? Mac OS X can read NTFS without any 3rd party support. I didn't realize MacFUSE had working NTFS writes, that's awesome.
-- Jason
     
mduell
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May 4, 2007, 11:02 PM
 
Yes, NTFS-3G supports read and write.
     
tws  (op)
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May 4, 2007, 11:23 PM
 
WoW... thanks all,

Mduell,

i'm new to mac - 5 days - can you elaborate on how to employ and implement MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.

i haven't got a clue.

thanks,

tws
     
Seattle
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May 4, 2007, 11:46 PM
 
Originally Posted by mduell View Post
Reformat as NTFS (which will erase all your data!), Windows can read it natively, and OS X can read it with MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.
You do not need to erase all your data you can run convert.exe from a command prompt on a windows pc to convert the Fat32 to NNTS (backup important data first).

How to convert a FAT16 volume or a FAT32 volume to an NTFS file system in Windows XP
     
mduell
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May 5, 2007, 12:11 PM
 
Originally Posted by tws View Post
i'm new to mac - 5 days - can you elaborate on how to employ and implement MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.
Any of the first half dozen or so hits on macfuse ntfs howto - Google Search will give you detailed directions.

Originally Posted by Seattle View Post
You do not need to erase all your data you can run convert.exe from a command prompt on a windows pc to convert the Fat32 to NNTS (backup important data first).

How to convert a FAT16 volume or a FAT32 volume to an NTFS file system in Windows XP
Heh, FAT32 has been deprecated for so long I totally forgot about convert.exe. Thanks for the reminder.
     
Dr. DDS
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May 5, 2007, 03:18 PM
 
you can format your drive to mac (HFS) and use Macdrive on your windows PC that allows PC read and write Mac formats
14" ibook g4 /1,42Ghz/60Gb/1,5Gb RAM!
     
   
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