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Any way to do this?

Submitted by william ahearn on April 20, 2008 - 3:50pm. PowerPC Macs

Hey,

Is possible to transfer AVI files from a PC to a Mac using a Hot Drive? A Hot Drive is basically an Apple laptop hard drive in an external USB case. If the PC formats the drive, is there any way for my G5 running 10.4.11 to see it? I'm thinking no but I know that I don't know everything. Any ideas?

Thanks,

William
www.williamahearn.com

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cwsmith's picture

Macs have been able to read a

Submitted by cwsmith on April 20, 2008 - 4:26pm.

Macs have been able to read and write to PC-formatted discs since what, System 7.1? There shouldn't be any problem transferring the files. Just remember of course that when you format the drive (on the Windoze side), you'll lose whatever data is currently on the drive.

True story: Back when my friend and I ran a recording studio, my friend Steve was sitting in front of his 386 PC running Windows 3.11, reformatting a stack of 3.5" floppies. I offered to help out on my Mac LCIII. "But I need them in DOS format," Steve said.

"No problem," I replied. "I can do DOS format on the Mac."

Within about 15 minutes, it was obvious that my LCIII was formatting DOS floppies *faster* than the 386 was formatting them. Steve now owns three Macs, and his lonely PC pretty much gathers dust.

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Funny thing is . . .

Submitted by william ahearn on April 20, 2008 - 5:41pm.

Hey,

I knew I could do it with floppies in 7.x.x or later or anything in what's now referred to as "classic" (sort of like the cola). With the death of floppies and my lack of interest in OSX (it just doesn't have the same hands-on feel. To me, 6, 7, 8, and 9 were personal). OSX just seems distant. For some reason I supposed that with networking and cross-platform compatibility being so much better that Apple may have killed the ability. Once again, I was wrong and thank you for your answer.

William
www.williamahearn.com

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dankephoto's picture

initialize the drive as NTFS on the Wintel box

Submitted by dankephoto on April 20, 2008 - 9:33pm.

On the PC, initialize the drive using the NTFS file system, rather than FAT32. Then on the Mac, install NTFS-3G so you can read/write to the drive. Without that addition, you'd be able to read but not write to the drive on the Mac.

Biggest problem with FAT32 is that you can't have files larger than (IIRC) 2GB. Awhile back I thought that didn't matter, but it wasn't long before it did.

dan k

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Thanks . . .

Submitted by william ahearn on April 21, 2008 - 12:13am.

Hey,

I'll give it a go.

Thanks again,

William
www.williamahearn.com

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Of course . . .

Submitted by william ahearn on April 23, 2008 - 3:41pm.

Hey,

Of course it worked. What a stupid question. Thanks again.

William
www.williamahearn.com

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