external hard drive format?

[goaliedad]

OK Geeks- my son (the goalie) bought a new Mac laptop- we have an old HP with his Itune collection. I borrowed an external hard drive to transfer the itunes. I know it has be formatted in FAT or FAT32. When I hook it up to our antique I am not given the FAT choice. The old PC is running window ex, but the USB port is 1.0.

Any ideas? ethernet connection?

thanks in advance.

Bt the way- I meant GEEKS in the nice way!

 

[jwstewar]

The old PC is running window ex

Windows what????

When you say that it won't give you the choice of FAT does it give you FAT32? Why not use that? The Mac should recognize it and I believe FAT will only recognize a drive up 540 MB......so FAT32 should be the way to go.

 

[goaliedad]

sorry about the typing- windows xp. the only option for formating is ntfs.

 

[Knute]

You can only use FAT on partitions up to 2 gig, over that you have to use FAT32 or NTFS (on Windows), and depending on the size of the partition you may well be limited to NTFS.

This page might help: http://www.macdisk.com/hugdsken.php3

 

[MossRoad]

No CD burner available? How about a USB pen drive? Flash memory? MP3 player? Anything with a memory chip and a USB connector should work.

Can you FDISK the external drive and just make one small partition under 500M and format that with FAT? Lots of choices.

 

[hudr]

I assume the drive you borrowed has no info that the person who loaned it to you wants to keep, right?
Won't Mac OSX read NTFS, but just not write it? If so, format the thing in NTFS, copy the files to it, then plug into the Mac and read/copy away. I don't think the USB1.0/2.0 should be an issue except w/ speed.

 

[goaliedad]

Hudr, you are correct. We did one song as a test and it worked fine. Late last night we transfered the library to the external, today after work my son is going to move it to hs Mac. And now my antique is no longer running low on memory.

Thanks to all.

 

[Holzster]

HUDR

Do I see a little Linux in you also? Answered that like a pro!!

 

[hudr]

HUDR

Do I see a little Linux in you also? Answered that like a pro!!

Yes, I have played a bit (or is it byte?) w/ the "alternative" OS's. Even wound up at full-geek level of AIX one dark and dreary night over a HDD head crash.
But, I have to admit, I still make my $$$ off of Microsoft.