From: steve harley
on 2011-11-26 11:30 John Sessoms wrote
I made prior arrangements with several of my group of traveling companions to
use their Macbooks to download photos to the LaCie USB drive. I installed
MacDrive8 on my own laptop so I could read & off-load the files when I got back
home.
so that your comment doesn't lead others to think this is necessary, note that
you could simply format the USB drive as FAT; Macs can read and write FAT, so
you could avoid needing the MacDrive software
It *may* not be necessary, but it sure did make life easier for me. The
problem I ran into wasn't on the Mac side of the equation. Windoze
acceptance of large FAT32 drives can be hit or miss.
When you get the LaCie drive you have an option to format it to use
"both" Windoze and Mac. It creates a 32GB FAT32 partition & the rest of
the drive formatted for Mac. A Mac can see both partitions, but Windoze
can only see the 32GB FAT32 partition. That's what I did when I first
got it.
But, I wanted one big partition using the whole drive that both systems
would be able to use.
I tried formatting the drive FAT32 using one of the school's Macs, but
my Windoze XP Photoshop system refused to recognize the drive. I don't
know why. No explanation, just not gonna' do it!
Which I don't understand because the computer I'm writing this on right
now has a 200GB FAT32 drive and it works.
This system is on its third motherboard, and I don't know how many power
supplies. It was originally Windoze 95 upgraded to Windoze 98 upgraded
to Windoze XP on a 30GB IDE HDD, then cloned over to the current 200GB
SATA drive about 3 months ago, but I think the shop I had do the work
for me uses a Linux system for the cloning.
After I got the cloned drive back, I tried running the tool to convert
the drive to NTFS, but it failed for some obscure reason. I think maybe
because Windoze XP just does not like FAT32, will only grudgingly work
with it and the tool would not work on a FAT32 drive larger than XP's
32GB FAT32 limit.
My other computer which I use for Photoshop (the one that refused to
recognize the LaCie drive when formatted FAT32) is XP Pro w/SP2 NTFS
from the get-go.
Anyway, back to the point - MacDrive8 was CHEAP from Academic Superstore
and solved the problem, allowing me to format the drive as a Mac drive
and still have the two Windoze systems MacDrive8 is installed on use the
LaCie drive.
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