hard drive question

R

RyanCharlick

New member
I have a harddrive that I created on a mac and now I have to edit with a pc. it's an ide hardrive in an enclosure and connects through firewire. I can get macs to see it fine, but I have to edit on pc right now and I can't get the pc to recognize it at all. it doesn't even show that anything is connected.

any suggestions.... thanks
 
The disk is in the wrong format. There might be a Windows app that will let you read a Mac disk, there was one called "MacOpener" but I don't know if it's still around. The easier way is to go get a firewire harddrive. DON'T reformat it (it should come formated as FAT32). on the Mac move all the files to the new FW harddrive. Two catches. First FAT32 won't allow files over 2 gigs so you may have to split some files to make them fit. And you probably want a drive that is FW and USB2. Mac's before the G5 only have USB1 and that is SLOW and Windows out of the box cripples the FW speed to about USB1 rates. If you have a recent Mac then USB is the safer way to go. Some apps for video editing install proper FW drivers in Windows so the FW transfer may be OK, test first.
 
Oh and the revers is also true. Windows uses NTFS as it's disk format and a Mac wont read it. Apple keeps promising NTFS read support but I have yet to see it work.
 
there is software out there to do this for you.

Check out: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

Alternately, if you have both a win and mac machine, you can just use SAMBA to copy the files to the win machine via network, then reformat the drive and send them back. OSX comes with SAMBA, which was an open source tool for sharing between linux/unix and windows.
 
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