need help formatting firewire!

[MegaCharger]

I recently bought a 120 GB firewire drive. Long story short, it was formatted only for Mac, but I need to be able to transfer files between the schoo Macs and my home PC. I took the drive to the store, they say I would need to format the drive in FAT32 or something to be able to make both PC/Mac read the files. He said I can only do it on a PC.

So is FAT32 the format I should format my firewire? And how do you format a firewire harddrive on a PC? Do you go to DOS or something?

 

[EeyoreX]

FAT32 will be fine. Mac can read and write to that format type. Simply plug the drive in on your Windows machine. Then, navigate to Disk Management, find and format the drive. Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management. Windows XP can only create a FAT32 partition of up to 32GB, so you will either have to create several partitions, or use something like Partition Magic to convert your current file system (if it works with the MAC file system, I don't recall).

\Dan

 

[InlineFive]

I believe Max OS X 10.3 can read NTFS so I would use that filesystem instead since it is better for large volumes.

-Por

 

[MegaCharger]

Thanks! I'll go try it now!

Oh I can't use NTFS since not all of the school's Macs are on the latest version of OS X =(

 

[EeyoreX]

I believe Max OS X 10.3 can read NTFS so I would use that filesystem instead since it is better for large volumes.

-Por

AFAIK macs can still only read NTFS volumes and can not write to them. Which would make exchanging data back and forth difficult. I may be wrong about the newest version of OS X. I guess the point is moot anyhow, since the OP states he doesn't have access to the latest version of OS X on all the school's Macs.

\Dan

 

[vietofmars]

http://www.dataviz.com/products/macopener/

http://www.iomega.com/software/macdrive.html