Boot Camp SL and Win7 on my Mini - What's the best way to share my files?

[dmk1974]

I just ran the Boot Camp utility and installed Windows 7 on my Mac Mini. Everything seems to work pretty well. From Windows I can see the Mac partition and from Mac I can see the Windows partition.

Each OS has it's own Users file structure. Now, I recently converted over to Mac this month and have over a decade worth of files from my PC that I plan to migrate over. Best-case, I would like to be able to easily access those files no matter what OS I am using.

Should I create a 3rd partition for just files? Pick either the Mac or Windows partition to be the master for the files? Can each OS easily use a different folder for the Users files (I know I was able to do it with Vista in the past, not sure about SL).

Thanks!

 

[P Mentior]

From what I understand about Bootcamp in SL it allows the windows side to read the Mac partition but not write to it. I would say that the easiest way would be to attach an external HDD and format it as FAT32 which i believe both OS's can read and write to. As to both OS's using different User folders I'm pretty sure that they can but I don't think they will use the same folder structures but I might be wrong as I have never tried to set that up.

 

[mac4drew]

You could just get

NTFS for Mac: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ (scroll down till you see NTFS-3G, it's free and works great.

and

HFS+ for Windows: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
It's $50, but there's a free month I think. Worked great every time I used it.

 

[dmk1974]

Man this migration and sharing of Windows and Snow Leopard is a pain! Maybe I should just give up on one of them entirely!

The FAT32 option is the most flexible, but with limits on the file size. For example, I wouldn't be able to write my Acronis TrueImage files to that drive from the Windows environment.

NTFS-3G is pretty attractive as an option. I could possibly get around needing to read/write files to the Mac drive from Windows. I'd rather be able to read/write to the Windows drive from the Mac.

Hmmmmm.....

 

[P Mentior]

You could also use NTFS-3G with an external like I mentioned above but with a NTFS partition. That would get around the file size limitations of FAT32.

 

[mac4drew]

Yeah I think NTFS on an external sounds just fine. I'm using it myself on my Linux machine for backups, precisely because of the cross-compatibility aspect. Another thing to worry about when it comes to FAT32 is that I've read it gets terribly slow on big disks. Haven't actually tried it on anything bigger than a flash drive, so I can't confirm this. But I think what I read is that Windows won't allow you to format over 32GB using the GUI disk formatter, even though much higher capacities technically work. They push this option to the command line because FAT32 is supposedly slow with modern hard drive sizes.