External HD that mac and windows can read

wsurfa

wsurfa

wsurfa

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I need to transfer c 40gbs of photo's from my Macbook to my parents pc vian an external HD- what's the best way to acheive this? cant he HD be formatted so the mac can write and the windows machine can read it?

Thanks for the help
 
It can be done.

FAT32 can be read and written to by both if I recall rightly. Obviously the limitations being the 4gb file size.

Alternatively you can have your drive formatted in HFS+ and use MacDrive (a Windows software) to see and write to it.

Mac OS X can read NTFS but not write to it natively. There are some apps like MacDrive for OS X but none I have experience with.

There's been a few topics like this, have a quick search and it should give more info.
 
Or network them both ? Fat32 and a pen drive as I doubt 40Gb of photo's will be in files likely to hit the FAT32 file size limit.
 
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My WD Mybook can be read and written by both platforms and I've never touched the partition on the HDD. I'll check to see what it's formatted in tonight and let you know.

It's a 250gb drive btw.
 
AFAIK, there are only 3 options :

1. FAT 32.
2. NTFS + MacFuse (on the Mac).
3. HFS + Macdrive (on the PC).

The first 2 are free, but the 3rd is not.
 
thanks for the replies - I'll try some of the options.

Phate - I'd guess it's formatted as FAT32 given the other comments.
 
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