External Drive Problem

[Chopsy]

I have an external 200Gb IDE drive in a USB enclosure. I had hoped to be able to use it on either iMac or PC, but I'm coming to the conclusion I won't be able to.

Originally I plugged the drive in to the iMac and it detected it as an uninitialised drive, and asked me if I wanted to initialise it. I selected the DOS format, and off it went. It completed, but it was only showing the drive as 69Gb. I used a PC to remove the partition (didn't know how to on the iMac!) and tried again on the Mac. This time I chose the Mac format option, and off it went configuring the drive. I've tried this three times now and each time it just seems to get stuck "configuring directories" It's been running now for 24 hours and the drive light shows it's still in use.

Any suggestion how I can get the drive to work with both PC & Mac? Or at least how I can initialise it properly just for Mac...

I'm running MacOs 9.2 and WinXp

 

[PTmon]

Do you have any other programs besides Apple's Disk Utility to format with? FWB Tool, LaCie Silver lining, etc. I'd give one of them a whirl. Select mac format, extended. HFS+ will be best for a drive of that size.

Without purchasing MacDrive for your pc you realize that you'll have to reformat it again on the PC if you want to see it, yes? Best bet would be to set up filesharing with either PC MacLan installed on your PC, or Dave installed on your mac. That way you can place the drive on one machine and share it between the two.

Best of luck,
PT

http://mahon.homeip.net/remember