Hi,
I’m having a bit of trouble here, I have 70 gb of my friends files on my Mac computer and I have put them on a external hard dive which his Windows computer won’t read. The thing is I done my research and formatted the hard drive to the required one but the Windows computer still won’t read it.
Any ideas where I’m going wrong or ways around it ? I just want the files in his computer then I can format the hard drive to suit.

Cheers

I’m sure Cougar or another it wiz will be along soon….

Would an option be to get a large volume memory stick and use that to hop stuff across?

I assume that they are standard stuff with the file extensions.. ?

So what format did you use?

I done my research and formatted the hard drive to the required one

Which is…?

What version of Windows?

How big is the largest file?

Haha yeah research wasn’t my strongest part of the post. I formatted to Fat 32 but then dropped the whole file on the hard drive so I clearly went over the max 4gb then with not really putting much thought in I changed the format to ( the older one can’t remember) and put all the smaller files on but that didn’t work either. So before I put it back to Fat32 and make sure all files are under 4gb just want to know if that is the best way to do it. It is only for a 1 off transfer.

Very old PC though. Running windows vista.

Thanks

Well, that’s where I was going.

FAT32 is the obvious choice but you’ve got a 4Gb limit on individual files. Confused about what you mean by “the whole file” – are you trying to transfer a disk image?

What are the files?

both pc and mac should read fat32, I think mac can only read ntfs.

another alternative is:

put the pc and the mac on the same network and connect them directly to each other.

You can connect to a pc share from a mac if you go apple K and type in smb://(IP address of pc.

to create a shared folder on pc, just right click the folder >properties>sharing.

you’ll find ip of the pc if you go start>run>cmd>ipconfig.

Files are just photos and music, I put all his files on my Mac from this external hard drive but then loaded everything off his iPad to it (maybe that file was bigger ) formatted it and that’s when the pic diddnt read it. I will have a play with it tomorrow night. I’ll check file sizes.

Thanks for your help

On the odd occasion I have a had a disc formatted on a mac not work on a PC, I Format the disc using the utilities on the PC.

you could just use a normal mac formatted drive and install the trial version of this software to read it

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/windows/how-read-mac-os-hfs-drives-in-windows-for-free-image-3369574/

I put all his files on my Mac from this external hard drive but then loaded everything off his iPad to it (maybe that file was bigger ) formatted it and that’s when the pic diddnt read it.

If you loaded everything on to it and then formatted it, that’s why it didn’t work. Formatting removes all the data.

Thanks every one, got it all working now as FAT 32. It had some big music files on it that I missed before. I broke them down to just under 4 gb and now no prob.
Cheers