Apologies if a similar question was posted before. I have a 120 gig usb external hard drive that is in Mac OS Extended Format. I am trying to share the contents of the hard drive with a Windows XP Home person. Is there a way i can work around this?

Off memory, i dont think i can format the hard drive to FAT32 from ibook can i? Even if i did, I'm pretty sure that Windows XP can't read FAT32 drive of this size. If i convert it to NTFS, my mac can most probably read stuff, but can't write stuff. Or of course i could be just spinning crap.

there is some magical number limit to fat 32 drives, it must be round 80gig, cos a friend of mine has a 160gig firewire drive spilt in half.

on an ibook you can partition the drive between Mac HFS and fat 32 thru disk utility, there's a partition tab, just set it to half and half...

It's not working not because of any filesystems or size limit.
It's because you are not telling Mac OS X to share the volume (the external HDD).
Download SharePoints - http://www.hornware.com/sharepoints/ and it will let you share any part of your filesystem. As by default, Mac OS X only allows you to share your home directory with Windows users.

my friend has had no trouble splitting his EXTERNAL drive this way, just be warned, for some reason final cut pro files get converted to some weird pc data file, never to be rescued...

Apologies for not being clearer. I'm not sharing as in putting it visible and usable on a network, but rather he's taking it to his home so he can physically connect it to his own peecee.

Just covert it to Fat32
I have a 200 gig hdd shared that way and both my mac and pc reads it fine.

To format it, go to disk utilities (i think) can format to extended PC (or something like that).

scruffie:

It's very doable. You simply need to format the drive for FAT32. You can't format to FAT32 easily (from disk utility) for drives over 80 GB (I think, the limit may be higher or lower) but you can do it from the command line. Just start a terminal, use fdisk to partition the drive, then format it fat32. That way the drive will be accessible for read & write by both windows and mac.

If you search on google, you should get detailed results as to how to do the fdisk and the format from the command line.

-Cemil

In fact, here is a link to a page which tells you, step by step, how to do it:


Mac OS X Hints - Format Large FAT32 Volumes

-Cemil

If you want the external drive to remain OSX formatted and then have windows still able to read it... Look at a product called MacDrive, it supposely is an application that you install on windows machines that enable them to read/write OSX formatted filesystems.

I only saw this application a few weeks ago, and have yet to look further into it.