?external drive between mac and pc?

[plaidclad]

Hi- I have to get a bunch of files from a PC user tomorrow, but intend on editing on my mac. He has his footage on a PC-formated USB2 drive, as well as on his PC.

I was hoping to just dump the files onto my external drive, and then work off of that. However, I formatted my drive using Disc Utility to be MS DOS encoded, and it did not work when I tested it with a PC.

Do I just cross my fingers and hope the drive works tomorrow? Should I format it on the PC? Should I try an application for Windows such as MacDrive? I need a quick solution by TOMORROW. I'm even willing to dump stuff on my laptop if I have to, but I don't know if I'll be able to plug in his pc-formatted drive into my mac.

in short: HELP!

shelby

 

[cinemakinoeye]

Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) includes read-only support for NTFS, so if the PC disk is formatted as NTFS and all you need to do is read the media, you should be able to do this with the Mac. NTFS is the recomended file system to use on Windows XP.

Some other things to keep in mind:

NTFS support was flakey in earlier versions of Mac OS X, so on the Mac side you need Mac OS X 10.4.1 or more recent (periodic Mac OS updates via "Software Update" is a good idea).

Mac OS X can also mount FAT32 volumes, however, it's limited as to the size of the partition it can see (I think it's 168GB or something like that), also, the FAT32 file naming convention is not fully compatible with the Mac and there are some other incompatibilities too, therefore, using a disk on a Mac that's been formatted with anything other than HFS+ could cause unexpected problems, so be careful.

It is not possible to create an NTFS partition or disk on the Mac, you have to do the formatting of the disk on a Windows PC.