smallears

Ok so here is the story. I am a student in interactive multimedia. I have mac at home just bought it. At school there are some classes with mac and some with xp. now we were given a Lacie Rugged triple interfce external hard drive. Now these hard drives are configured for mac use right out of the box. I use mac at home for my projects but when i have class where we use a windows xp machine how do i go about accessing that hard drive that i was giving. or vise versa, if i use the hard drive and save some thins from the xp machines at school on it how do i set it up to access thee files on my mac.

your help would be much appreciated

thanks

sinclair_tm

Fist of all, make sure that there is nothing on the drive, as you may need to reformat them. When it is plugged into your Mac, right click on the drive icon and select Get Info. A window will appear. Near the top there will be a section names General with a triangle next to it. If it is not pointed down, click on it. There it will list the stats of the drive. If you want to use it on a Windows PC it needs to say MS-DOS (FAT 32) next to Format. If it does, then you don't need to do anything. If not, you will need to reformat the disk. The best way is with the Mac, as if the drive is over 30 Gig Windows will format it NTFS, which you can't use with the Mac. In the Utilities folder there is an app named Disk Utility. Open it and select the icon of the disk in the left bar. Then select the tab to the right named Erase. In the pull down menu select MS-DOS (FAT) and then give the disk a name. Remember, it should be in the old 8.3 naming scheme with only letters, numbers, or the underscore. Then click the erase button and wait. When it's done, it'll mount on the desktop and you can then quit the app and eject the disk, and it should now work for both Macs and Windows.