router & external hard drive
Just bought a macbook pro, (OS X 10.6.2), we have a pc, that the Linksys (WRT54G) router is connected to, the printer is networked thru this router. I have a Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive this is connected to the pc thru a usb connection (I primarily use this to store my pictures & documents). I was able to set things up so that I can access these pictures thru my macbook, but I am unable to save anything to this hard drive. From what I've read I'm assuming it's the difference between how a pc & a mac read/format these hard drives.
So, my question is, if I had an apple airport extreme as my router instead would I then be able to connect this Maxtor external hard drive to it & both the macbook & the pc read & write files to it?
Or if I reformatted (after saving all the content first) the hard drive so the macbook could read/write to it, could I still have it connected thru the pc, like I do now? I'm looking for a solution that doesn't require the external hard drive directly connected to my macbook, for portability reasons.
Thanks so much for any help you can give, if it helps I'm new to mac.
Tami
So, my question is, if I had an apple airport extreme as my router instead would I then be able to connect this Maxtor external hard drive to it & both the macbook & the pc read & write files to it?
Or if I reformatted (after saving all the content first) the hard drive so the macbook could read/write to it, could I still have it connected thru the pc, like I do now? I'm looking for a solution that doesn't require the external hard drive directly connected to my macbook, for portability reasons.
Thanks so much for any help you can give, if it helps I'm new to mac.
Tami
Comments
If it's formatted as FAT32, pretty much ANY computer will be able to read and write (but file sizes are limited to <3GB.)
MacOS Extended is unreadable by anything but MacOS.
There's another Windows "flavor"... I can't remember the name right now... NSXfilesystem?... something like that? ... Macs can read it, but not write to it.
I'm sure there are "advanced" workarounds for all of these, but that's the situation for the average user. If you want to use the drive to read AND write from both Macs and Windows... use FAT32 (as an aside... that format will also allow the drive to be used by devices such as PS3, DVRs, etc)