The HDD format dilemma.

Ok say I am both a mac and windows (only for gaming related things) user. I use an external WD passport hard 500GB hard drive for all my data. Its formated to mac journaled. This is very good for mac related work because it can handle files over 4GB. However if i have a game patch or mod I want to download in OSX and transfer over to windows via my external ( windows partition is formated in ntfs , because it was not working in fat32, i tried like 9 times) it is impossible because windows can not understand the hard drive is thier ( I have tried software to correct this but im very skeptical because it killed the file system and everything became corrupted)

I know its complicated but that was the first issue. The second issue is, I want to buy a new HDD thats fat 32. I want to keep it that way because when i formated this one to mac, it started acting a little crazy and could die any day now i think. It makes random beeps once a day and a grinding noise. This started happing right after i formated to mac journaled.

Does anyone have a solution to this?

 

I don't see how formating a drive will make it die. I would stay away from FAT32. I haven't had any problems with software to read NTFS. That is your only option.

 

There are two things I use for this problem: MacDrive and Paragon NTFS. I have MacDrive installed on my MBP and Paragon NTFS installed on my iMac. Both of them work flawlessly as far as I can see.

 

Alternatively, Snow Leopard offers hfs+ read-only support for Boot Camp out of the box, but that's a few months out.

there's really no elegant solution here. You can use an NTFS drive and use ntfs-3g/MacFUSE or other utilities in OS X, but they're not perfect.

 

Yeah stay away from fat32. I've got an external MyStudio II. Its got an HFS Journaled partition for Time Machine, an HFS partition for other longer term storage and working files, and an NTFS partition for my Vista related data. The laptop itself has the HFS Journaled and NTFS partitions.

I use NTFS 3G for reading the Vista ntfs partitions and Macdrive to read the HFS partitions when I am in Vista. Haven't had any issues transferring any files back and forth.

I also can't see formatting effecting the mechanics of the drive.

When I partitioned my external I think what I did to make it work was to make all 3 partitions NTFS while in Vista, and when I booted into OS X formatted the 2 partitions to HFS and HFS Journaled respectively.

 

snow leopard gives hfs+ read to windows??!?!?!

rock on. read write problem solved. if both windows and mac can read from each other, then writing back and forth doesn't really matter.

 

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/
Write NTFS volumes in OS X.

Second: It's highly unlikely to be a formatting issue. More like flaky hardware.

 

there are free programs out there to add NTFS read/write support to OSX... no need to pay for them... on the same machine, the few times i run Windows, its in VMware which can drag and drop stuff over fine, even on the bootcamp partition. If transferring to a different computer, not to worried about format on a 4gb USB flash drive I use.... don't have many gigantic files to worry about any 2gb or 4gb limits.