Share External Hard Drive Windows and Mac

E

edencorbin

New Member
Hello everyone,

I am trying to set up an external Lacie drive so that a windows XP and a MAC OSX system can access and read/write to the external drive. The Lacie has two fire wire inputs. I assumed this meant two computers could be plugged in at once, am I wrong there?

First I had it formated mac, and it worked for the mac. I heard that if I formated it for Windows both computers could access it, so I did that. After format, It worked for a few minutes from my XP computer. Now my windows computer keeps saying the drive can no longer be accessed (it still is plugged in). The MAC can read it fine but says it is read only permission (and won't let me change it.).

To put it simply, how do I format, prepare, etc. this drive so it can be used by both computers.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.
 
Windows prefers the NTFS file system for harddrives and hence all drives it formats will be default NTFS. Mac OS X includes read-only support for NTFS. Both can read and write Fat32 file systems just fine, so make sure that when you format, you select Fat32 file system.

I don't think you can plug the harddrive into more than one computer, I think the other input on the harddrive is so that you can use something like a video camera, and connect the camera via firewire to the HDD, and import video directly HDD, rather than importing to the computer, than copying it to the HDD.
 
Can I format FAT32

Thanks for the knowledge.

It sounds like the best way to format this would be FAT32, and I would have to make 32GB partitions. Is this possible to do from my PC? Or would this be better to do from the Mac? I can't seem to be able to format the HD on the Mac since it is read only, am I missing something?:confused:
 
If you format it on the Windows computer, you should be able to make up to like a 149GB partition with FAT32. I dont know how big the drive is, but that should be sufficient for a lot.
 
I thought it had to be 32Gig

Thanks again for the knoledge,

I thought the HD could have Fat 32 partitions of only up to 32.x GB a piece if formatted on PC. Is this not correct?
 
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