Question re: external hard drives and macs

scoot on

Just wondering if someone can help me with this. I've converted the bf to a mac user and I'm buying him an imac for Christmas. He currently has a pc with two external hard drives containing lots of music.

If I hook the external hard drives up to the iMac will they work?? Or is there a different format for Mac and PC's?

Red Alert

Macs will happily read the FAT32 format, which is what most PC's external hard drives use. (You can format them HFS, which is Mac only if you want to but there's no point usually.)

babypink

they'll work fine unless they're formatted as NTFS. If they're formatted as FAT all is good.

Macs don't play nicely with NTFS drives. They're probably FAT, but it's something worth checking.

J-blk

babypink wrote: »

Macs don't play nicely with NTFS drives.

Um, yes, they do. Macs will read/write to FAT32 and they will read only NTFS, again with no problems.

You can also get the ability to write to NTFS but it can a bit complicated - there is however a commercial solution, which works very well:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

If you only want to copy things off the hard drive, both FAT32 and NTFS will work fine...

well i'm sitting here on my mac with the external harddrive attached and we've been watching movies via the hardrive/network/ps3 all morning. However, don't do what my husband just did, and remove the device without ejecting it, because now the mac doesn't recongnice it!!! and he's an IT expert? hmmm.

PeakOutput

if its formatted ntfs and you are going to reformat it to fat32 or the mac only format which i cant think of the name of now PLEASE back up all your music and videos first as formatting wipes the drives

i wish i had an other half who would buy me a new mac....lucky w****r

johnk123

OP, I'd love to be getting an iMac for christmas!

babypink

J-blk wrote: »

Um, yes, they do. Macs will read/write to FAT32 and they will read only NTFS, again with no problems.

hehe - that's not exactly playing nicely now is it......generally people want read and write ability out of the box! They play nicely with FAT, as we've all pointed out.

p.s. lucky sod!

J-blk

babypink wrote: »

hehe - that's not exactly playing nicely now is it...

True, but it can't be described as not working either. If the OP's very, very lucky other half only wants to copy his data off the HDDs or otherwise access the files, NTFS is perfectly fine.

In any case, you're probably right that the drives are most likely FAT32 anyway, every single external HDD I've bought (bar one which was Mac-friendly) has been formatted as FAT32...

scoot on

Thanks everyone. How do I check what format the hard drives are at the moment??

It's taken me months to convert him to a mac. I've a macbook which he uses all the time but he's always said he'd never switch from a pc. The thought of getting used to Vista has finally turned him tho. I'm half getting him the iMac so I can play with it too

ZENER

I think you're going to have to convert those drives to FAT32 eventually. It's all very well playing his music but I presume like everyone he's going to expand his collection as he goes. In that case he's going to need to save music to those drives.

To find out what format they are. Plug them into your Mac, select the drive that appears on the desktop (Windows parlance, sorry) and press
Cmnd & i (or Apple & i if that's what your keyboard has to the left and right of the spacebar) This will open a panel similar to this:



You can see the format on this drive is FAT32 for example.

ZEN

K.O.Kiki

Noobs

All you need to read/write to NTFS on Mac is MacFuse with NTFS-3G.

5 minutes installation, 1 reboot, sorted.
And it's free!

scoot on

ZENER wrote: »

I think you're going to have to convert those drives to FAT32 eventually. It's all very well playing his music but I presume like everyone he's going to expand his collection as he goes. In that case he's going to need to save music to those drives.

To find out what format they are. Plug them into your Mac, select the drive that appears on the desktop (Windows parlance, sorry) and press
Cmnd & i (or Apple & i if that's what your keyboard has to the left and right of the spacebar) This will open a panel similar to this:



You can see the format on this drive is FAT32 for example.

ZEN

Perfect. Thanks!

Actually, another questions while I'm at it. How easy is it to run windows via Bootcamp? There's on program I know he'll want to run via windows.

chrislad

Very easy. Start Bootcamp, choose your partition size and put in the Windows disc. That's it.

scoot on

Ok then, another quick question. Currently setting up windows on the iMac. I'm at the stage where I've to install the bootcamp drivers. The instructions say to insert to Mac OS X driver CD but I got two cd's with computer. Is it the first one or the 2nd one I use?

*edit* nevermind, think it's sorted.

faceman

Wow your BF is a lucky bloke!!

Dont forget you cant run Windows from an external drive on a mac without some manual tweaking which looks tricky.

scoot on

faceman wrote: »

Wow your BF is a lucky bloke!!

Dont forget you cant run Windows from an external drive on a mac without some manual tweaking which looks tricky.

And he damn well knows it

tbh it's half for me too. I get to use it aswell
Think I'm pretty much sorted now. It was fairly straight forward. The only thing is the instructions say that if you want to choose between windows and mac OS press the option button on start up. What's the option button?

J-blk

scoot on wrote: »

What's the option button?

It's essentially the "Alt" button - looks like this:

scoot on

I'm back

Since installing windows yesterday the windows media player won't play videos properly. It comes up with a green fuzzy screen and no sound comes out. Does anyone have any idea how to sort this?

J-blk

scoot on wrote: »

Since installing windows yesterday the windows media player won't play videos properly. It comes up with a green fuzzy screen and no sound comes out. Does anyone have any idea how to sort this?

What kind of video are you trying to play? WMV or something else? Since this is a fresh installation of Windows, you could be missing several codecs to get Windows Media Player to work with your various videos.

You can check that the problem does not affect the system overall by playing the video with an application that has its' own built-in codecs, like VLC:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

If it plays fine with VLC, you can at least narrow the problem down to WMP - where it would be most likely a missing codec...

scoot on

It's working fine using VLC. What should i do now to sort out the codec??

*edit* sorted. Downloaded a new version of wmp and it sorted the problem.

J-blk

scoot on wrote: »

sorted. Downloaded a new version of wmp and it sorted the problem.

Cool . You still may need codecs for video types not supported by WMP, like DivX/XviD, etc. I just use FFDShow for those, but I think the K-Lite Codec Pack includes a lot more to cover obscure file types. There's also a great little app, "Gspot" that can analyze the video and tell you which codec(s) you're missing:

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

scoot on

J-blk wrote: »

Cool . You still may need codecs for video types not supported by WMP, like DivX/XviD, etc. I just use FFDShow for those, but I think the K-Lite Codec Pack includes a lot more to cover obscure file types. There's also a great little app, "Gspot" that can analyze the video and tell you which codec(s) you're missing:

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

Perfect. Thanks a mill, will have a look at that.