| 20 Dec 11, 7:31 PM MisterBear UK(WA), 8 yrs    |
Just get a drive and plug it in and copy a file to it, then go to the other computer and see if you can see the file and copy it off. Then copy another file to the drive and then go back to the first computer and see if you can get the file off it. If you can then yer sorted. If not, get back to us and then we'll worry about it. And if you want a cheap way to see what works then try a pen drive you can get an 8GB one for about £7 or a 32GB for £18. Can you tell I'm bored and have nothing better to do with my life? Edited 20 Dec 11, 7:38 PM by MisterBear | |||
| 20 Dec 11, 7:58 PM geek_love 2 yrs |
http://www.applesprite.com/blog/2011/03/20/share... Not seen this before, has anyone used exfat formatted drives? You have an image, Like a good girl should, But you'd take it from its package, And you'd break it if you could. | |||
| 20 Dec 11, 8:14 PM MisterBear UK(WA), 8 yrs |
Not needed it yet, but might try it one day. Anyway another option would be to partition the drive and then have NTFS and HFS on their own partitions and then you can write Mac files to one and PC files to the other if there is any problem. Probably best to create the partitions on a Mac. Can you tell I'm bored and have nothing better to do with my life? Edited 20 Dec 11, 8:15 PM by MisterBear | |||
| 21 Dec 11, 2:59 AM SlutLesley UK(G), 4 yrs |
MacDrive is a good solution. It will allow your PC to format,read and write Mac formatted drives, And cut any complications on the Mac machine, where you just plug and go. It formats the drive in a format known as HFS+, which will only be readable by Mac's, or PC's with macdrive installed. (IE a PC without macdrive cant read it) You could format the drive using FAT32 - Although I'm not sure how compatible this is with Mac OS X. The limitations you have here, is you can't save a file larger than 4GB, and if using windows XP, you can't make a partition any larger than 32GB. You can format a large drive with a third party utility, like Partition Magic, larger than 32GB in XP, and XP will read and write to it once it's created. The upper limit for a FAT32 partition is about 8TB or 8192GB.
Hope this helps. L x
Edited - cos @Geek_Love correctly pointed out that the file size limit in FAT32 is 4GB, not 2GB as I originally stated. Edited 21 Dec 11, 7:34 AM by SlutLesley | |||
| 21 Dec 11, 9:27 AM Top_Class UK(GU), 2 yrs |
No internet required - a NAS drive comes with a small length of network cable, plug one end into the drive and the other into the Ethernet port of the PC (or a spare port on your router). A WiFi NAS drive does it all truly in the 'ether' provided your PC/router is WiFi-capable too. eg, 1TB Verbatim NAS (has 1xGigabit ethernet port and 2xUSB v2 ports. Compatible with XP, Vista, Windows 7, MacOS and Linux. Use USB ports to add extra hard-drives/pen-drives to the NAS to share someone else's non-compatible hard-drive/pen-drive with your Mac. Plug the NAS drive into your router instead of your PC and anyone on your house network can use it be they running Windoze, Linux or Mac. Take the drive somewhere else and do it all again with someone else's PC or in someone else's home network. It's DLNA compliant too - Digital Living Network Alliance - so you don't need to always use a PC to access media stored on it, any DLNA compliant playing device can). Whichever solution you chose you'll have to sort out for yourself compatibility of application-level data between PC systems as files which work great on a Mac won't necessarily be usable on a Windows and vice-versa. What most of these posts in this thread are nattering on about is how files are stored in file-systems rather than what any given file contains. NAS cures filesystem-level woes. Compatibility between the data in files and the applications trying to use the data remains the responsibility of the owner/operator and is a whole different kettle of ball-game..
"Fork handles?" "No, not 'fork handles' ... four candles." | |||
| 22 Dec 11, 9:01 AM Persia_Porsche UK(EH), 3 yrs |
Ok thanks for all the helpful comments and advice all, it's appreciated.  I shall take it away and attempt to find the best solution. x I'm loud and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody's got to, but I am not a monster. I'm not. | |||
| 22 Dec 11, 5:15 PM bohnanza UK(FK), 12 yrs  |
NAS is not a suitable answer because: a) It is an over expensive way to move files b) The problem isn't sharing data, it is transferring data. Running applications on both machines was never a worry. The problem is: 1) Media files are downloaded on a Windows machine connected to the Internet. 2) They then have to be transferred to a Mac without an Internet connection. That is all, no networking of data, running applications or whatever. I have the perfect accent for conflict resolution, shame about the personality. | |||
| 22 Dec 11, 8:40 PM pod333 UK(DD), 6 yrs |
According to this article: http://techqa.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/can-mac-r... Macs can read NTFS OK, but not write them. So if you just want to save the files on a Windows PC and only read them on a Mac, then you can simple format your drive using windows the "easy way" from explorer (go to 'My Computer' and right-click on the external drive, then choose 'Format...') etc. Bollocks spoken like an real expert. | |||
| 23 Dec 11, 4:16 AM ocimum_sanctum UK(EH), 2 yrs |
Meh, depending on your router (i.e. if it will act as a reasonable ethernet switch/hub), it may be easier to keep the external hdd connected to the pc and create a file share with the appropriate directory... despite my disdain for all that is apple, I'd assume a macbook will mount a SMB/CIFS service (if it can't, feel free to use it as a convenient door-stop).
-- |
