FW drive on both Windows & X?

guarthoguartho
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
My brother has an iBook G3 running Panther and a ThinkPad running WindowsMe. He has a bunch of bloated course-ware for flight school that won't fit on his ThinkPad so he's looking at an external hard drive. These days his ThinkPad is pretty much just for tht course-ware so he wants to be able to use it on both like he can a flash drive.



Is it possible to use an external Firwire drive on both going back and forth? Can OSX read Windows formatted external drives?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    gene cleangene clean Posts: 3,481member
    It can read, but it can't write. Not with NTFS. It can both read and write for FAT32, but that filesystem sucks and I'm not even sure if it can support more than 2 GB of data.



    If you just need the Mac to read the data and Windows to write it, NTFS is fine.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    ipodandimacipodandimac Posts: 3,273member
    I WOULD NOT try using one drive between the 2 systems. You WILL lose your data sooner or later, if not right off the bat. Apple says you can do it, but if it's important data dont risk it. People in editing classes here at school try it and screw themselves over every time.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    daveleedavelee Posts: 245member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Gene Clean

    It can read, but it can't write. Not with NTFS. It can both read and write for FAT32, but that filesystem sucks and I'm not even sure if it can support more than 2 GB of data.



    If you just need the Mac to read the data and Windows to write it, NTFS is fine.



    I have a 20 GB external (firewire) FAT32 drive, which serves well for switching data between OSes (OS X and Win).



    But I strongly support the notion that it is not a particularly good way of doing things. Absolutely be prepared to have the drive go titsup at any minute.
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