Harddrive Problems

drunkymonkey

Might seem like a stupid question but you never know till you ask!

I just bought a Western Digital external harddrive. I have a Mac but my main computer at the moment is a Windows. It works perfect on the windows plug and play really but when i plug the harddrive into the Mac to put stuff onto it its Read only and i can't take anything off the Mac.

Why is this?

barryj

Because it's formatted as an NTFS volume, which is read-only to the Mac.

Mac native volumes are HFS+, which Windows can't read.

If you want to share the same volume between both platforms it needs to be formatted as FAT32 or else use a third-party utility on either the Mac or Windows to let it read and write to the other format - I've no experience with such.

Be aware that reformatting the volume to FAT32, will overwrite any data already on it, and also FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4GB - which may cause you some issues.

Another option would be to create two volumes on the one drive - one for the PC and one for the Mac - note again, this is a destructive option.

Personally, I'd keep a separate drive for each system. If you just want to swap some files now and again, either use network sharing or a usb key (formatted FAT32).

- barry

drunkymonkey

Thanks Barry , pretty much explained it all for me!

It was just a few files i needed to get off so i'll use a USB key, i was just wondering why it didn't work with both.

Knasher

OSX just gained support for exFAT so I'd recommend formatting as that so you won't have the file or partition issues that FAT32 has.