Portable hard drive on Mac

Maccy

Maccy

Maccy

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Have a formatted external hdd and was going to use it to backup stuff on my Macbook but OSX tells me I only the permissions to read and nothing else. Tried using Disk Utility but all options were blanked out.
It's accessible from Windows but not OSX :confused:
 
Format it in Windows as FAT32, and then format it again in OS X to a proper format that isn't NTFS.
 
Last edited:
Windows will only let me format it as NTFS, d'oh!

Have just read from Googling that Mac OSX can write to FAT32 but nothing bigger than a 4gb file.
 
I've used Partition Magic to convert it to a FAT32 disc, Mac OSX will let me write to it!

Thanks for your help :)
 
NTFS = Windows Read/Write, Mac Read only.
Fat32 = Windows Read/Write, Mac Read/Write - limited to <4GB file
HFS+ = Windoes *no* Read/Write (unless used with MacDrive or the likes), Mac Read/Write.

So the best is FAT32 is you want a middle ground or you can try out MacDrive, I'm using that and loving it to do backups between my Vista/Leopard systems, I move big video files from my video camera and the 4GB is a big limit to me.

There is also a NTFS+3G format out there, for Linux/OS X systems to read/write on an NTFS drive, I tried the stable form and it was cool but very very slow (even compared to a FAT32 drive) - apparently the "accelerated" version is faster but least stable...
 
Yup went for FAT32, works great. Only trouble is that it takes literally a few minutes for my Mac to pick it up but Windows picks it up instantly. Is this normal?

Btw Dr Jones, Leopard arrived and installing atm, have mailed you and updated trust :)
 
It does take OS X a few seconds to recognise FAT32 drives, I've set an external HDD into 2 partition, one is HSF+ and the other FAT32, often the HFS+ shows up first before the FAT32 coming into my desktop...
 
This is pretty annoying for me as someone who has switched over to a Mac recently. I have an external disk formatted as NTFS which has a lot of DVD images on it which obviously won't fit onto a FAT32 drive. I can't convert to HFS+ as I need to use Windows for work.

Are there any plans for proper NTFS support? Even Linux can write to ntfs partitions.

FFS! ;)
 
Wicksta said:
This is pretty annoying for me as someone who has switched over to a Mac recently. I have an external disk formatted as NTFS which has a lot of DVD images on it which obviously won't fit onto a FAT32 drive. I can't convert to HFS+ as I need to use Windows for work.

Are there any plans for proper NTFS support? Even Linux can write to ntfs partitions.

FFS! ;)
Click to expand...

Linux can write into NTFS?

Only thing I know is NTFS-3G that allows Linux/OS X to read and write into NTFS - that would still involve reformatting the drive to NTFS-3G and the stable version is s-l-o-w.
 
Dr Jones said:
Linux can write into NTFS?

Only thing I know is NTFS-3G that allows Linux/OS X to read and write into NTFS - that would still involve reformatting the drive to NTFS-3G and the stable version is s-l-o-w.
Click to expand...

NTFS-3G isn't a filesystem type, it's a driver that allows you to read/write an NTFS partition from a Linux distribution. You don't have to reformat anything. :confused:
 
Is it?

Because when I install everything, it still didn't read the NTFS drive. I had to run disk utility and partition a drive to NTFS-3G (it's under one of the options along with HSF+, FAT32...)

Then it worked.

Something I did wrong?
 
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