# NTFS, FAT 32 and HFS



## chief1284 (Jun 30, 2003)

Ok, basically I'm soon planning on making the big jump from PC to Mac, after many years of contemplation. The thing is I have a 250 Gb NTFS external hard drive with basically everything I value in this world on it (well perhaps a slight exageration but you get the point). So I know the new update of MacOS X has read-only support of NTFS, but what I was wondering is if I could change to FAT32 or HFS without losing all my data (yes I know I could back it up but that would take a long time and I have nowhere to put it anyway!!). 

Also is HFS windows compatible? Likewise is a drive formatted in FAT32 on a mac compatible with windows? 

1 more thing how good is the NTFS compatibility with the new OS? Cos i was simply thinking of using my external hard drive to store everything I have and maybe take some things off freinds' PC's, and using my Mac hard drive for nything new. Good idea? Any help would be useful, cheers.


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## macguru (Oct 9, 2005)

Wait until the Intel Macs come out this January....BUY one then buy a usb 2 case put your hard drive in that then connect it to your Mac. Boot up. What also you could do is if you have windows xp or so installed on your hard drive you can run windows on your new intel Mac as well. Dual core cpus thats the news this coming year so wait unti at least the consumer dual core "yonah" intel Macs come out before you buy. This way you are assured of compatibility!
What I would do is wait until the iMac Intel computers are released this spring and go with one of them........


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## chief1284 (Jun 30, 2003)

for various reasons I don't much wanna get intel mac's, mostly cos I don't trust the 1st generation to be any good - u know what apple's like with new products. I'm keener on getting a g5 iMac. And besides I don't want a dual boot machine, I've had enough of microsoft, I'm abandoning them. 

So, could anyone give me answers to the original questions?


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## Couriant (Mar 26, 2002)

to be real honest, if you have a nic card in both, you can connect the two together with a cross over cable and transfer the data that way. You will need to share the external drive though on the PC. The OS X supports TCP/IP as standard now so the transfer shouldn't be a problem.

PS, I don't think the Macs support FAT32.


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## chief1284 (Jun 30, 2003)

I think you slightly misunderstood my dilemma. I have an NTFS formatted external hard drive, the data on whihc i want to use on a new iMac. To me there seems to be 3 options:

(1) Leave it as NTFS and simply read the data off it, and add any new files to my new internal hard drive on the Mac, and perhaps add some files to the external through freinds' PC's. 

Though I was wondering if anyone knew of any difficulties Mac's might have with reading NTFS. Its one thing claiming NTFS read-only support, and another for it to actually work properly with no difficulties.

(2) Format the drive as FAT32 (Mac does indeed support FAT 32 by the way), so I can still use the drive to get things of other PC's. However I'm aware this can cause problems, and theres a lot of speculation about size limits to FAT32 partitions, and filesizes over 2Gb. Is this really a problem?

(3) Format it in HFS or even 2 partitions, 1 of HFS and 1 of FAT32. Problem is I can see this causing all sorts of problems.


My opinion is to keep it in NTFS, but I still have lingering doubts over how compatible it is with Mac OS. I mean I don't wanna open a file off it for some error meassage to appear and for me to lose all my data or something. So what do people think I should do?


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## Couriant (Mar 26, 2002)

from what you said in the first post, I assumed you have a PC already. As for the FAT32, it's been awhile since I messed with Macs and FS.

I remember that my friend has an external drive that he used on the Mac first, then was able to use it on his PC without any problems. Is your external drive a branded name?


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## chief1284 (Jun 30, 2003)

sorry, my bad, true i can hook up the pair. But really theres no need, my hard drive should work fine at read-only if i plug it straight into the mac, so i can move the files onto my mac no problems. Thing is i want something compatible with mac and pc so i can take my hard drive to use on other pc's. Don't know how to do this.

But yeah my hard drive is a brand name, LaCie 250 Gb external hard rive, with firewire 400, 800, usb 1 and 2. Though what I'm thinking is i will just leave it in NTFS, I've heard too many problems with setting up big FAT32 partitions and stuff. Though obviously if anyone knows any better I'm welcome to advice.


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## jiml8 (Jul 3, 2005)

You can't set up a FAT partition that big.

Go with ext2. Support is available for both Windows and Mac:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/
http://www.fs-driver.org/

Ext2 is Linux native file system and should handle your big drive without trouble.


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