Firewire Hard drive compatibility?

drazztikkadrazztikka
Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
Is it possible to swap files between a mac and a windows computer with a external firewire harddrive?

I need to get 40Gb of wav's from pc to mac.

Do I have to watch out in what format it is formatted? If so, which please?



Any more advice? (type of harddrive,...)



Or is it maybe possible by just connecting the 2 computers by a firewire cable?



Thanki

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    paulpaul Posts: 5,278member
    well if you restart the mac holding down the "t" key it will start up in "Firewire Target Disc Mode" which is essentially using the Hard Drive of the mac as an external drive. I'm not 100% sure if this will work with PCs but I know it works flawlessly with any other mac with a FW port... I can't imagine it would be that different on a PC. If it works you could just drag the files over to the mac's HD from the PC (or vica-versa)



    No need for an external hard drive at all...
  • Reply 2 of 6
    thunderpoitthunderpoit Posts: 709member
    another option would be to network the two via a hub or crossover cable, if the pc has 100mb ethernet, not as fast as firewire, but it should work
  • Reply 3 of 6
    josephgjosephg Posts: 111member
    IIRC:

    A Mac formatted drive (HFS+) will not work with Windows. However, a Windows formatted drive (FAT32) will work with as an extra drive on a Mac (but not as a bootable drive). So my advice is: format the Firewire drive with Windows, and everything should transfer fine.



    I haven't tried this, but I remember wanting to do this, so I'm pretty sure it works.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    chuckerchucker Posts: 5,089member
    Yes, I believe OS X works with FAT32 drives just fine (except booting). If you truly need HFS+ on Windows, there are multiple tools like MacOpener, HFSExplorer or MacDrive for that.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    overhopeoverhope Posts: 1,123member
    If you've got both computers in close proximity, you can just connect them via Ethernet and do it all through FTP. I speak from recent experience.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    matsumatsu Posts: 6,558member
    This is a useful little discussion.



    I have recently had the need to move data between a macs and PC's again. Could a firewire drive be formatted into two partitions, one HFS+ for mac stuff only, and the other partition in FAT for PC/Mac files and such? For example if someone wanted to run a couple of programs off the firewire HD on macs and use the other partitions for common files/data for both mac/PC ??



    possible? insane? fuggedaboudit?
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