how to format hdd for pc+mac?

[Craig M.]

i've just got a couple of external hdds for my mac mini, but i want to rip my cd's using eac on my pc.

does anyone know what i need to do so i can use the hdd's with my pc and then plug them into the mac?

the drives are iomega minimax 500gb firewire usb2. apparently they will work out the box with the mac but i need to do something to them to use with a pc and mac. thanks.

 

[Anonymous]

Do you not have a network? You'll need to reformat them to fat32 otherwise which will allow you to use them on both.

 

[Craig M.]

yes i have a network, but being a bit new to this i don't know how to copy across the network. the pc is connected by ethernet cable to a netgear router, the macmini by wifi.

 

[Anonymous]

On Mac Mini - Finder > Go > Connect to Server... then put in afp://(ip address of your PC). Then you'll be prompted for your PC password.

 

[Anonymous]

Oh yeah and dependent on what version of OSX you are on you'll need to go onto the sharing tab in system preferences and check Windows Sharing.

 

[Craig M.]

thanks a lot, i'll give that a whirl shortly. i've just got the macmini so i imagine the os is the most recent version. thanks again.

 

[russ74]

Not sure it applies in this situation but to get a mac to write to a NTFS formatted drive you need to install a third party driver called NTFS-3G. Never used the Mac version but whenever I've had linux installed alongside XP it's been rock solid.NTFS-3G homepage

 

[professorhat]

Easier just to use FAT32 as Octopo says. If you're using a drive which is bigger than 32Gb, you'll can use a tool called Swissknife which is free to format it as one big FAT32 partition - it only runs on PC though. You can download this here.

 

[Craig M.]

well i finally got them to talk to each other, the biggest headache was my pc's firewall.

before i realised my pc's firewall was blocking it, i googled the problem and was advised to type into "connect to server" smb://ip address of pc/sharename of folder on pc.

also, i didn't have file sharing enabled on the pc. still, got there in the end although i feel a headache coming on. time for some choons i think.

prof, you were right, it would just have been easier to re-format

 

[Anonymous]

Pleased you got there in the end, google is your friend - being able to file share is better than shifting those drives about. Enjoy.