We are heading out next week for a one month shoot out of the country; I'm bringing a Panasonic HDX900 and a Sony EX1 camera that belongs to the producer working with us. We will be transferring the EX 1 files from his Mac to a WD MY Book external hard drive. I assume that the Mac will format the drive to the apple specifications; if this is correct what procedures will I have to perform in order to transfer the files from the external hard drive to my PC when I get home?

Thanks

Steve

External portable drives often come pre-formatted as FAT32, which can be read or written to by both Mac & PC.  If you do format the drive as MAc, get a copy of MacDrive for your PC. This will allow your PC to see teh Mac formatted drive.

 Hi

You can format the disk on a PC, using the FAT32 file system.

It will be good for the Mac and the PC.

If the disk is MAC disk, you can use programs like MACDRIVE in order to read it on a PC.

 Thanks Randall and Dor

You can also now use Paragon on the Mac to read NTFS formatted drives.

....and MacDrive7 to read HFS+ formatted disks on a PC.

 "You can also now use Paragon on the Mac to read NTFS formatted drives."

OSX has always been able to "read" NTFS.  Paragon allows you to Write to NTFS.

Right...  I wrote that in a hurry and meant to say "read and write NTFS"

OSX has always been able to "read" NTFS.

Well, supposedly. Not in (my) everyday practice. Had lots of drives that did not show up, so I made a habit of never assuming that it would work.

I agree about drives not showing up.  However, I think that is just typical firewire flakiness.  I was mostly pointing out Paragon adds the ability to Write to NTFS.  And it rocks!

I disagree that it can be attributed to FireWire flakiness. Some drives don't mount, others are recognized as empty (even if they are loaded), asking me to format the drive. Reading NFTS drives on a Mac - in my experience - works about 60-70% of the time. Which means that if you rely on that feature to work, you have a 30-40% chance of being out of luck.

Also, my first experiences with Paragon were unpleasant. MC wanted to rebuild a media database on a 1TB drive (I forgot to hide the media folder), and I aborted that. Had to reboot, because everything froze. It killed the drive's file structure, it wasn't readable anymore, not on a Mac nor on a PC. It was a backup copy, which I could easily redo, but it was still unexpected.

I should of course never have tried to rebuild a database for 700+ GB of files on an NFTS drive using a Mac MC, so yes, it was operator error. Just waiting for the day when the format type of a drive simple won't matter anymore.

I would suggest to only use Paragon/MacDrive to copy the files from the original drive to bring it into your environment.  It is not uncommon for me to have a client provide me with files/media on a PC formatted drive and I've found the best way to go is to invest in another drive of the same size or larger, format for Mac, and copy all of their stuff to the new drive. 

Before Paragon, I had to mount NTFS drives to my PC, "share" the folder on my network, then copy across to my HFS+ drives.

cuervo:

....and MacDrive7 to read HFS+ formatted disks on a PC.

 addendum: and MacDrive7 to read and write HFS+  formatted disks on a PC. Worked good for us.

 Thanks to all, I finally connected the Western Digital external drive to my computer and as you said it was already formated as FAT32.

Thanks again

Steve Cocklin

Kenton.VanNatten:

It is not uncommon for me to have a client provide me with files/media on a PC formatted drive and I've found the best way to go is to invest in another drive of the same size or larger, format for Mac, and copy all of their stuff to the new drive.

Kenton,  that's an approach that I use too, except that I use an old PC resurrected as a Linux box to do it.  It can read and write both NTFS and HFS+ media, as well as FAT and FAT32.  Total cost?  Zip.