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AndyFinkenstadt
09-27-2005, 09:55 PM
Howdy!

I am now the proud owner of a PowerMac (80GB internal hard drive, 1GB ram), running Tiger 10.4.2. I have yet to actually install anything on it but the apple-provided softwares, mostly for lack of time or brain-power during those few hours a day when I'm at home and need to sleep.

I also have a signficant investment in PC hardware running Windows XP.

I am also now the frustrated owner of an external firewire hard drive (Oxford 912 chipset, Seagate 300GB 7200rpm ata hard drive). I haven't yet hooked it up to the mac, but my main PC recognizes it, but only understands that it might have 128.00 GB in the volume manager, instead of the 300.00GB (minus marketing overhead) it should have.

Are there any good hints for how to make this drive/enclosure combo work with its entire capacity, and then a recommendation for a good filesystem choice to load just 1 copy of the NI Kontakt pak files for both systems to be able to share?

best,

andy
jackn2mpu
09-29-2005, 11:48 AM
I don't know that you can have an external drive be recognized by both Mac and PC OS's. At least you can't with Glyph extrnal drives. They come formatted for Macs and to use on a PC they must be reformatted for the PC, so that's the basis I'm going on.
As to XP not recognizing the approx. 300 gig, try reformatting the drive. Of course, this means you'll lose all your data. That's assuming there isn't something massively wrong with the drive to begin with.
AndyFinkenstadt
09-29-2005, 02:34 PM
There's nothing on the drive at all. . .
fvicente
09-29-2005, 04:38 PM
Hi Andy,

How new is your PC? It could be that it isn't capable of recognizing a drive that large.

Also, from my understanding, Macs are capable of reading drives formatted as FAT and FAT32 (not NTFS). However, they will read those drives much slower than they would a drive formatted as HFS (Mac format).

I have not tried it myself as I simply bought 2 separate drives and formatted them accordingly (ie 1 for Mac and 1 for PC).

HTH,
Fvicente
AndyFinkenstadt
09-29-2005, 05:43 PM
How new is your PC? It could be that it isn't capable of recognizing a drive that large.


An interesting point. It currently has dual 120GB mirrored drives (4 drives, 2x120GB). The new drive is firewire-attached, the OS recognizes it as removable storage, but the volume manager only acknowledged it as being 128.00GB wide. I might have to hook it up to the Mac, nuke the master boot record, and see if the PC can re-recognize it.


Also, from my understanding, Macs are capable of reading drives formatted as FAT and FAT32 (not NTFS). However, they will read those drives much slower than they would a drive formatted as HFS (Mac format).

I have not tried it myself as I simply bought 2 separate drives and formatted them accordingly (ie 1 for Mac and 1 for PC).

HTH,
Fvicente

I had not thought to consider the read speeds as being significantly different based on the filesystem type. I use NTFS everywhere, and just assumed that Tiger would be able to mount the drive, at least in read-only mode.

The two drive solution sounds too easy, though. :)


thanks for the assistance, both of you.

andy