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crmartin00

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 15, 2006
2
0
I have a new mac mini and have installed boot camp and windows XP successfully, my problem is that I have a miniStack external hard drive connected through Firewire and USB, and I can only view the drive when running in Mac mode. When I switch to XP, I can not view the drive at all. Is there a way to make this drive appear? I want to be able to read and write to the external miniStack using both operating systems. Any help would save me some hair. Thanks
 

xUKHCx

Administrator emeritus
Jan 15, 2006
12,583
9
The Kop
the drve is probably formatted in hfs if you did the inital install with osx, which is why windows cant see it. You might want to check out MacDrive
 

crmartin00

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 15, 2006
2
0
MacDrive

Is there any way to reformat the drive so that both OS can read/write to it? I would like to not buy MacDrive is possible. But I have to be able to Read/Write in bot OS's. Thats for the help.
 

xUKHCx

Administrator emeritus
Jan 15, 2006
12,583
9
The Kop
NTFS (windows XP standard) for drives bigger than 32gb can only be written/read from within windows. OSX can only read it.

FAT32 both can read and write to it but are limited to 32GB (* EDIT: Might not be completely true see below)

HFS (or any variant) only OSX can read/write to it.


"Windows XP: The Windows XP installation program will not allow a user to format a drive of more than 32GB using the FAT32 file system. Using the installation program, the only way to format a disk greater than 32GB in size is to use NTFS. A disk larger than 32GB in size can be formatted with FAT32 for use with Windows XP if the system is booted from a Windows 98 or Windows ME startup disk, and formatted using the tool that will be on the disk" taken from http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/FAT#FAT32

So you could possibly do it, open up Disk Utility (from with OSX) and format the drive as Fat 32 if it will let you. BACKUP what ever is on the external if it isnt already as it will be lost when the drive is formatted.
 
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