How to use a hard drive on both a PC and a Mac

Thu May 29, 2008 4:41PM EDT

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Moving your files from a PC to a Mac? You may find that the job isn't quite so simple, because Macs, out of the box, can't read drives formatted with the NTFS file system, which is the standard for Windows. How do you solve the dilemma of getting hundreds of gigs of data from your Windows PC to your Mac?

While a variety of solutions are possible, the best I've found is to use a simple piece of software called MacFuse. MacFuse is a small and very simple piece of software that lets Macs read NTFS drives (and, in fact, drives formatted with a variety of file systems).

To get it, just drop by the web page linked above, and download the appropriate version for your Mac (10.5 if you have Leopard, 10.4 if you have Tiger). Install the dmg package like you would any software and reboot (optionally). You're done.

Grab that hard drive or any Windows formatted thumbdrive and plug it in. The drive will appear normally on the desktop and can be read or written to as you would any Mac drive. There's no need to launch anything special in order to read the drive. MacFuse is automatic.

One caveat: Writing files to an NTFS drive on a Mac using MacFuse is slow (see the FAQ), so unless you really need to have a drive that both types of computer can access, consider reformatting the drive on your Mac after you've grabbed everything you need from your PC and copied it over.

LINK: MacFuse 

Comments on How to use a hard drive on both a PC and a Mac

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  • 6 Posted by lemjsy on Thu Sep 3, 2009 6:48PM EDT Report Abuse

    cnull- also, FAT32 doesn't support large file transfers, meaning, you can only transfer a file to the drive that has a size of less than 4GB.

  • 7 Posted by ron.childs on Thu Sep 3, 2009 8:49PM EDT Report Abuse

    I bought a IMac, Mac Pro and Mac Book Pro, I exchange files on a daily basis using thumb drives, portable hard drives, emails etc.

  • 8 Posted by mannybrito on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:05PM EDT Report Abuse

    Have a mac and it can read ntfs, just cant write. However, my vmware fusion takes care of writing between by windows partition and mac partition.

  • 9 Posted by syounger_1 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 9:52PM EDT Report Abuse

    check out a product called NTFS for Mac...let's you write to a NTFS drive from MAC.....and it is free right now from Mac Mall (www.macmall.com)....i have it and it works like a charm.....install the driver and you are good to go.

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