Portable HDD, formatted NTFS on Mac OS X

Hello,

I have a portable Maxtor harddrive (2.5") which runs off the USB power supply and I've been using it for a month or so on my Windows XP notebook and I just connected it to my macbook just recently to get files off it, which works fine, but now I'm wanting to put files onto it but it doesn't seem to work because I'm assuming NTFS is a Windows only format or something?

Is there a way I can make the harddrive usable (drag and drop) files between the winxp and mac os x laptops?

 

You would have to format it in FAT32 for it to have read/write compatibility with OSx and Windows.

 

You could connect the HD to a windows machine, enable sharing on it, create a network connection between your Mac and your windows machine, and access it via the network.
Or you could run Windows in a virtual machine such as VMWare or Parallels on your Mac and access your HD.
Or you could download and install MacFuse http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ and access your HD.

All three methods work, although the third method is the easiest.

 

Has macfuse gotten more reliable lately? From my experience it's been very finicky to use.

In addition to the suggestions give above, you could format your drive to HSF+ and install MacDrive on your Windows computer, although it costs a bit money.

 

To be clear, NTFS can be read by Mac OS X, but not written to, so that's why you can see its content but can't edit it or add content to it.

If you format to HFS+ (Mac OS X), then Mac OS X will have no problems, but Windows can't read or write to it.

So if you want the easy way, just format it as FAT32 (MS-DOS in Disk Utility), and both operating systems can read and write to it without a problem.

But yeah, there are limitations to FAT32, so if you know those limitations will affect you, then maybe you can consider formatting for HFS+ and as system_159 said, purchase MacDrive for Windows which enables it to read and write to HFS+.

As far as I know, MacFUSE is still a bit troublesome.

 

Specifically, the main limitations of FAT32 are that it doesn't allow the size of any one file to be greater than 4 gb, and it doesn't have a user/permissions management system (mainly an issue in a multi-user environment with sensitive information).

If neither of those are issues for you, then you should be fine.

 

Thanks for your replies everyone, also I've heard that with FAT32 files become fragmented? Is that true? The hard drive is 160GB so I would have to get the files off somewhere first before I can format it back to FAT32 correct?

Also with the MacFuse program, I tried downloading it and installing it yesterday (I'm new to Mac OS) and it worked fine but when I went to install the second leg of the program NTFS-3G and it said MacFuse needed to be installed, even though I just installed it literally 20 seconds ago.

Any ideas?

 

Correct on both counts. (However, NTFS gets fragmented too, so it's no different.)