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General discussion

External Hard Drive

Oct 14, 2007 8:56AM PDT

I have a Freecom External Hard Drive 160GB. It is partitioned with one large NTFS partition and two smaller FAT32 partitions. I have two machines, a Windows one and a Mac. I'd essentially like to get all the data off those two machines onto the external, so I can access the data on both those computers, but, the Mac won't "see" the drive or any of its partitions. The Mac is an Indigo Clamshell iBook, with OS 9 at the moment - but OS X panther is on its way to me.

So my general question is, is the Mac not recognising the HD because of the OS, or because the Mac itself won't support the drive? Will Installing OS X panther fix this?

Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Because of that version OS.
Oct 14, 2007 9:03AM PDT

Things improve mightily with a current version of MacOSX.

If you remember your Mac history, for many years you would buy software to read and write MS-DOS or other non-Apple formatted media. Today people expect to not have this issue but your time period is when it was not so.

Bob

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(NT) So another week's wait until I get OSX should fix this?
Oct 14, 2007 9:13AM PDT
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OSX will recognize FAT 16 and FAT 32
Oct 14, 2007 9:19AM PDT

Neither of these formats are ideal for apple storage but they will work. Whether the other NTFS format will cause problems ??? I don't know.

cheers

grim

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I'd wait.
Oct 14, 2007 10:33AM PDT

Trying to fix it today will involve older, forgotten products that I haven't seen in over a decade...

Bob

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Re: I'd wait.
Oct 14, 2007 11:26AM PDT

I will do just that. Having thought about it properly, transferring all my data (which includes a lot of music) to an external, so I can use it between two machines was a pretty silly idea anyway. Not just because I hardly use the Mac, but also because it has USB 1.1.

I'll just be using the drive for backup, with an NTFS partition (Windows) and a HFS+ partition (Mac). Glad I came to my senses before it was too late, LOL.

I'll return with an update next week sometime.

Thanks for everyone's help.