pc disks and OS X

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I am having problems with zips and floppies that are pc formated. Some times OS X (10.1.5 & 10.2.6) likes them and sometimes not. The floppies are for my digital camera that won't take mac floppies and the zips are for school work that goes back and forth between PC's and Mac's. The problem never seems to start in OS 9. It is always in OS X that the disk is working fine then strange things start happening. The drive starts to slow down when saving and then it becomes unresponsive all together. When I switch to OS 9 I can get my disk back but the information is corrupted. I try to make sure that the disk is always formatted by a Mac. But that doesn't seem to help. Any suggestions. I lost two floppies of family pictures and 1 large HTML project on a zip in the last two weeks. The floppies were formated under OS 9 and the Zip was fat 32 by a Windows XP machine. I had used both on multiple previous occasions.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    vandewaalsvandewaals Posts: 450member
    What might work better would be to use Disk Utility in OS X to format all your disks to MS-DOS PC Exchange format. I have two USB keychain drives that I keep formatted this way and I have no problems with PC-Mac transfers. Formatting on your XP machine might make them not backward compatible somehow. Just an idea. Someone else might have a better suggestion .
  • Reply 2 of 6
    you said that you start out with the disks formatted for mac... if I'm not mistaken it should be the other way around. Macs should read PC formatted disks but pc's won't read mac HFS formatted disks...
  • Reply 3 of 6
    oldmacfanoldmacfan Posts: 501member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Dark Seraph

    you said that you start out with the disks formatted for mac... if I'm not mistaken it should be the other way around. Macs should read PC formatted disks but pc's won't read mac HFS formatted disks...



    My reference is that the Mac is usually doing the PC format.

    I hope that clarifies the situation
  • Reply 4 of 6
    oldmacfanoldmacfan Posts: 501member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by VanDeWaals

    What might work better would be to use Disk Utility in OS X to format all your disks to MS-DOS PC Exchange format. I have two USB keychain drives that I keep formatted this way and I have no problems with PC-Mac transfers. Formatting on your XP machine might make them not backward compatible somehow. Just an idea. Someone else might have a better suggestion .



    Most of them are Formatted with the Disk Utility. Sometimes I have to format them in OS 9 when DU won't recognize a disk.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    for the most part I tell students to format on the pc side as the start...

    this seems to work at our institution.



    (just fyi)
  • Reply 6 of 6
    elricelric Posts: 230member
    I use a click disc between my macs and my old pc laptop which works great because it has its own unique disk format but I did have some problems awhile back because of a bad usb cable all i can figure is that it was loose and would wiggle a lil and disconnect then reconnect real fast which would make it go fubar fast I replaced the cable and all is fine now. What I really want to do is get one of those thumb drives that uses the sd cards (the same kind my camera uses) this would allow me to transfer files bewteen pc/mac and interface with my camera easily also.
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