Formatting my new (removable) IDE drive so XP and MACs can read it?

gizmo1990 · 3 Mar 2006 at 10:48

I've just brought a 200 gig IDE drive for use as a backup unit. It's going to be placed in a USB caddy I've also brought.

The primary use of the drive will be for my main workstation which is XP but I'd also like to be able to use the drive with macs. From what I've read macs can't see NTFS partitions only FAT32 which would mean me having to divide the drive up I guess.

However I've also read that FAT32 can only be patitioned into 32gig chunks? Is this true?

If so is there any other ways for making the drive useable by both a pc and mac? Ideally I'd like to divide the drive up 50/50 is this possible?

Any advice appreicated.

AFK_Matrix · 3 Mar 2006 at 11:08

Well mate i have just bought a emac and i have an 80gb laptop drive in a USB caddy and it was to backup from the PC so I have it formated as an NTFS HDD with no partitions on. I wanted to use this to put some stuff on the emac so i thought what the hell and just plugged it in. Low and behold i bloody well works with no software or anything, it comes up as another drive on the mac desktop much like the internal mac HDD.

So basically wack it on ** PC and enable it under disk management and then format it as NTFS and then just plug it straight into ** mac it will have no probs mate.

gizmo1990 · 3 Mar 2006 at 11:19

Wow cool, that sounds great!

Anyone else like to confirm if this is totally stable? I was lead to believe that macs can't read ntfs?

Not that I don't believe you AFK_Matrix but like well, it would be nice to have this confirmed some more people?

AFK_Matrix · 3 Mar 2006 at 11:30

Sure i understand mate, but i can tell u i was transfering around 500 songs and some other junk a few nights ago and the mac never crashed once and had no problem reading all the file formats i had on there. It could see everthing i had on the HDD. I will mention though i have the latest OSX Tiger so don't know if that makes a differance.

I presume thats what u meant by stable?? If not maybe i can clarify it more, or put a file on my external hdd that u would want to copy and see if it all works ok?? Anyway i am sure other people have done this so we'll see.

VeNT · 3 Mar 2006 at 11:38

only issue with XP/NTFS is if encription is on then it won't be readable by other PCs (I've only heard of this, never seen it happen)