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Tom Foolery

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 16, 2007
244
0
Toronto, Canada
i formatted my ipod for mac, but i want to get a file from it on my windows computer, but each time i connect it all it says is reformat ipod, how do i open my ipod on windows without reformatting
 
If the drive is formatted HFS+ (which is the default format for an iPod on OS X), you aren't going to be able to read it without a 3rd party app like MacDrive. I was able to take my iPod from my Gateway to my iBook without problems, and copy files back and forth (onto/off the iPod), but that was because the drive was FAT32 formatted. It was pretty cool; I'd expected iTunes to try to format my drive upon connection, but instead, everything showed up. So yeah--if you want to use an iPod on both computer types, it needs to be FAT32 formatted.
 
mac drive works pretty smoothly but the only thing is i may wish to plug into the odd windows computer that doesn't have mac drive on it from time to time
 
Then you need to format it to FAT32.

Bear in mind though, that FAT32 has a limitation of 4 GB per file size... iirc
 
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