hard dual availability

[famtek]

I just bought maxtor 750 gb external drive. set it up for use with Time Machine. Works fine. I'd like to have my PC access these files. When I connect via USB, Windows PC does not recognize the drive. Now, I'd like to reformat drive for use with my Windows PC and cant' figure out how. Can I have hard drive make files available to both operating systems.

thanks.

 

[biglebowski]

Why do you want windows to access time machine files they two completely different things and not interchangeable. A mac can read only from NTFS/FAT but windows cannot read from a mac partition. If you want to format the disk in windows connect the disk and go into disk manager, right click the drive and format.

When I was born I was so suprised I didn't talk for 18 months

 

[Welshbird]

I have a drive I share between windoze and my mac, and I formatted it as FAT32 - no problems then. Both can read and write to it.

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]

 

[ObviousTroll]

willif -

I played with this a bit the other week. TimeMachine won't use FAT32 directly. What will happen is that TimeMachine will create a DMG on the FAT32 drive. It will then run extremely slowly.

Extremely. Slowly.

I was only getting a few gigabytes an hour out of it - which doesn't sound bad, except it was trying to backup 100 gigs.

 

[Welshbird]

Ah, sorry - I didn't know about that.

I use a different backup plan to that on mine.

This article might be helpful to you.

Fee

"The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea." Isak Dinesen

 

[drlex]

Best solution is to partition the drive and have one as NTFS/FAT32 for Windows and one as HFS/HFS+ for the Mac.
Alternatively, I use MacDrive software on a PC in order to read & write to Mac-formatted disks. Also has the advantage of showing music files on CDs which have been 'tweaked' with additional PC software.

soi la, soi carré

 

[Welshbird]

DRLEX, the OP suggests (s)he wants to access the back-up files from the MAC via Windoze, so I don't expect two partitions will help that.

Fee

"The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea." Isak Dinesen

 

[drlex]

Willif,
Ah - my error! I was under the impression that Time Machine backups needed to be restored from within Time Machine, so didn't absorb that part of the post. Apologies.

If you take ObviousTroll's point about FAT format and speed, be aware that one blogger reported problems when using Time Machine on disks that had been originally Windows-formatted. (

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/appl...me-machine-but-theres-an-easy-fix-316573.php)

soi la, soi carré