Sharing an External USB Hard Drive between Windows XP and Mac

  • Thread starter Thread starter Manzoorul Hassan
  • Start date Start date
M

Manzoorul Hassan

I am trying to figur eout if an External USB drive can be shared
(alternately) between a System with XP and a Mac. I have 2 laptops (a
Mac and a XP) and am looking for a large common drive that I want to
use as my Music, Doc etc storage and be able to use from both of my
systems.

Would I need to format the Drive specially?
Really appreciate any / all help.

- manzoor
 
31 Jan 2005 15:11:14 -0800, (e-mail address removed) suggested:
: I am trying to figur eout if an External USB drive can be shared
: (alternately) between a System with XP and a Mac. I have 2 laptops (a
: Mac and a XP) and am looking for a large common drive that I want to
: use as my Music, Doc etc storage and be able to use from both of my
: systems.
:
: Would I need to format the Drive specially?
: Really appreciate any / all help.

This will only work if you format it FAT32. You should probably format it
under Windows; I seem to remember receiving limited formatting
options when I've tried to format USB drives on the Mac OS X. Be advised
that FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit.

Unfortunately, NTFS can only be accessed read-only on the Mac.

Another option is to format it for the Mac and use software like MacDrive
to access it on the Windows machine, but you'll need to have that software
on any Windows machine that you use.
 
Back
Top