mac pro

[marin001]

my daughter has a mac laptop, i recently made her a external drive so she can backup some school work she has on her mac. when she connects it and tries to transfer some of her work over, the mac says it is not allowed. so i was thinking that maybe since i formatted the external drive from a desktop pc in ntfs that maybe a mac and desktop pc are not compable. if they are'nt should i just re-format the drive on the mac????

or should i just connect one mac to another mac and transfer that way.????

[YukonMaster]

Hi

this is a quote from emac82

"Apple can read information on an NTFS drive, but it cannot write to it. You are best to format the drive to FAT32. FAT32 works on both PC and Mac..only downside is that it cannot write a file over 4GB (this may or may not be an issue).

If it is an issue, then you could partition part of the drive to FAT32, and the other part Apple OS Extended Journal..........

My drive was NTFS and when I switched to mac I had to move the files from the drive to my mac, format it to FAT32 and I transferred it back to my ext. hd, and it's been great ever since." The rest of the info and be found here
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=3376944
This thread does come to a conclusive answer on how to do it.

YukonMaster

[marin001]

Hi

"Apple can read information on an NTFS drive, but it cannot write to it. You are best to format the drive to FAT32. FAT32 works on both PC and Mac..only downside is that it cannot write a file over 4GB (this may or may not be an issue).

YukonMaster

now when you said write a file over 4gb, do you mean one file that is over 4gb or several files totalling over 4gb??? i just want to be clear on this part, and thank you for your response, at least i know what the problem is now.
:D

[YukonMaster]

Hi again,

Because that post was originally made by another user, I cannot be 100% sure whether they meant 1 or in total, but I am confident that he meant it could not copy a single file that exceeded 4Gb.

YukonMaster

[Mac Medic]

You cannot write to NTFS, you'll have to format the drive HFS+ with disk utility.

[marin001]

i used partition magic and reformatted it to fat32, and it worked fine thanks for everything everyone. :D

[YukonMaster]

Glad it worked out for you.