Getting Vista to read a Mac external drive

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Oct 3, 2009 | 05:36 PM

Control It

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MrTheBadGuy

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Getting Vista to read a Mac external drive

I am trying to get my images on an external Mac formatted drive onto a Vista based PC.

It's not being recognised...It's about 300 GIGS of data. Do I have to copy the data back onto a Mac and reformat the drive to be able to be used on both systems?

TIA.

Oct 3, 2009 | 11:10 PM

Simba

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You'd need something like MacDrive to mount the HFS+ file system on doze.

You can alternatively reformat the drive into a DOS format, however, be aware that the DOS/NTFS file systems are woefully inferior to HFS and can lead to data loss under certain situations.

Short answer: If you run a DOS file system, don't keep any sensitive data on it that isn't backed up elsewhere.

Oct 9, 2009 | 01:40 PM

sean

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From: Mulholland Drive

Thanks, been having the same issue.

If I format an external drive in a Win format will it be readable on the Mac? I have a bunch of videos on an external that's Mac formatted that I want to be able to transfer to my Win 7 box when it gets here.

Oct 10, 2009 | 01:22 AM

Simba

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Quote:

Originally Posted by sean

If I format an external drive in a Win format will it be readable on the Mac?

Yes, OS X can play with doze volumes. The reverse is not the case without some third party software.

It's not a bad idea to format an external drive with two partitions if you use both operating systems on the same drive-- one HFS, one NTFS. That way you get the benefits of the HFS journaled file system under OS X, and can easily dump stuff into the NTFS partition from doze.