USB HD on MAC

[aizlumzan]

got myself a portable USB laptop HDD. My college lab is of mac while at home i use a PC. I thought this HDD work like my Flash drive where PC and Mac has no problem. Now I find computers in the labs detects the HD but as read only. I can not copy anything from Mac. Anyway to get MAc OS to have full control of the HD?

thnx

[clocker]

Doesn't Mac use a different file system than Windows NTFS?
That might be the problem.

[lynx]

Mac OS X understands NTFS, but because of the security aspects it is read only.

On the other hand Mac OS X fully supports FAT32 so you could use that as a compatible format between the two systems. If you have an earlier version of Mac OS you need PC Exchange. In either case you should be aware of some limitations.


The maximum file size with FAT32 is 4GB.
You may be limited with respect to the maximum volume size with FAT32, since XP can only format FAT32 volumes up to 32GB in size although it can handle up to 2TB. There may be size considerations with Mac OS too.
Mac OS has extended attributes (also known as Alternate Data Streams) which will not be supported by XP so they may be lost.