BIG PROBLEM HERE; Mac not seeing images on my windows formatted hard drive

[fotomike]

Hi all,
BIG PROBLEM HERE!!
I am a newly convert to mac. I have portable harddrive that I store all of my images on. These hard drive where formatted in a windows XP format. My problem is that when I look in my photo files using my mac, the mac does not see all of the files, it does see 90% of them but not all. However when I take the HD to my old windows machine the files / image ALL show up.

Can anyone explain this and how I can get my mac to see all of my images files. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP!!!!



Thanks
Mike

 

[mkrishnan]

Hi Mike,

I'm not 100% sure, but... one thing pops into my mind immediately. Windows has a setting to "safely eject" peripherals like USB drives and flash sticks and so on. Are you using this when you remove it from the PC? I think the problem you are having is that you are not properly ejecting the drive from the Windows system, causing it to have "unfinalized" files that don't appear.

In case that isn't it, though... what is the format of the drive? Is it FAT32?

 

[oceanmonster]

What is the drive format. If you plug it in on the mac and control click get info it will tell you.

 

[fotomike]

the format of the drive is - windows NT filesystem, doe this help

Mike

 

[oceanmonster]

the format of the drive is - windows NT filesystem, doe this help

Mike

Yeah I think that is the NT filesystem that is the problem

Id move the images off the HD and make Sure they are safe! Then reformat the HD in the Mac Disk Utility in Fat 32 format then recopy the files back on. But before you do this make sure those photos are very secure saved in another place off the hard drive. I'd suggest copying them back onto your pc hd and burning them to cd as well so you have them saved in two places.

I had a similar problem with a portable HD i bought and reformatting it fixed it all up.

 

[mkrishnan]

^^ This will also let you write safely to the drive from OS X.

 

[fotomike]

THANKS, I kinda figured i would have to do that. It just stinks because I have over 250gigs of image I'll have to do that to.

Could I a 250 harddrive, format it with the mac, connect it to the windows machine and do a mass transfer though the widows being that windows sees all of the images?

thanks
Mike

 

[sjl]

Could I a 250 harddrive, format it with the mac, connect it to the windows machine and do a mass transfer though the widows being that windows sees all of the images?

Possibly. Make sure you choose "MS-DOS File System" for the format of the hard drive; any other option will not work on the Windows box. If you're going to partition the drive, make sure you choose the "Master Boot Record" partition scheme (also known as fdisk, possibly called the PC partition scheme.)

See the Disk Utility help for more info.

 

[oceanmonster]

THANKS, I kinda figured i would have to do that. It just stinks because I have over 250gigs of image I'll have to do that to.

Could I a 250 harddrive, format it with the mac, connect it to the windows machine and do a mass transfer though the widows being that windows sees all of the images?

thanks
Mike

I reformatted my external disk when i bought it the Fat 32 system and it works fine moving files between os's

 

[fotomike]

thanks all
where do I find the mac disk utility so I can reformat a new harddrive in the fat 32 format?

thanks
Mike

 

[oceanmonster]

thanks all
where do I find the mac disk utility so I can reformat a new harddrive in the fat 32 format?

thanks
Mike

it is in the Utilities folder in the applications folder

 

[Nermal]

It may not be necessary to wipe the drive. In Windows, go to one of the "missing" folders and go to Properties > Security. Make sure that Everyone has access to that folder (and all the parent folders).

 

[ChrisA]

Why are you physically moving the drive? Don't you have a network?

Share the folders on the Windows machine and the Mac will see them.

OK if you must move the drive (no network) try having the PC write them to a big ZIP file then unzip them on the Mac.

 

[-hh]

Something quick to throw in here...


If you don't yet have a fully redundent backup copy - NOW would be a good time!



-hh

 

[Colonel Panik]

Hey guys, check out <http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/>. It "implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X". Including NTFS.

So, this means that if you install MacFuse, you're able to read AND WRITE (woo hoo) to NTFS formatted drives. You could check this out, and if it doesn't work, I too would suggest that you get a new HD and make a network and copy the files that way.