Reading Mac formatted Firewire Drives on my PC

[Rail Jon Rogut]

King..

I still think that the drive has non standard formatting. If I can think of anything else, I'll let you know. BTW have you used any other FW drives on your system before? Command+I on the Mac won't tell you enough.. you may need to check it out with the Apple System Profiler to see which driver is on the drive.

Ric...

Mac OS can only read a file up to 2G in length.

For Windows, check out this link for max file sizes.

I personally would format the drive for the native OS it's going to be used on the most. If the drivers (on both systems) are right.. everything should work fine.

Rail

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Digi definately don't tell you to use ATTO to format FW drives... and I believe this is the crux of your problem. I run PT on both platforms and I'm absolutely positive about the formatting issues. I also have a FW drive which I can read in XP SP1 which was formatted correctly.. so I'd recommend you take the drive back to where it came from and have them copy the data to another drive, reformat that drive using the guidlines recommended by Digi (No 3rd party extensions and using the "Erase Disk" function) then returning it to you. Odds are that the drive probably isn't even readable on most Macs with that formatting.

You can read about FW formatting guidelines here.. the relevant text:

Supported formatting utility: Mac OS "Erase Disk" command
1. Select firewire drive (highlight drive icon on desktop)
2. Go to the "Special" menu in the Apple OS menu bar
3. Choose "Erase Disk" command
4. Choose Mac OS Extended (HFS+)
5. Note: partitioning is not an option using the Erase Disk command. To increase performance and improve seek time, Digidesign recommends that you allocate a portion of your hard drive for recording. In Pro Tools, Choose Setups/Preferences and click Operation. Under the Open Ended Record Allocation option, select Limit To and enter a number of minutes to be allocated.

Third-party drive utilitites not supported:
While third-party drive format utilities may work on the owner's CPU where that application's software and extensions are installed, the best way to ensure compatibility on all Macs with firewire drives is to use the Apple Erase Disk function for formatting. If you plan to also use your Firewire drive on other machines that may not have the same third-party drivers, your drive may not mount on that machine, or you may experience DAE or system errors.

Rail

[kinglenario]

yeah, i have read other windows formatted firewire. this drive will allow me to partition the digidrive, so i guess that is a good sign. i do have to return this drive today, i would just like to figure this out before i do. that way at least i will know what i'm facing next time i have to grab stuff from a mac drive. i think i will try to talk to the head technician from where the drive came from, hopefully he will have some more information. thanks so much for your help. there aren't many of us cross platform users out there. we need to stick together. and if protools goes all pc [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] , we're gonna be a comodity. i was talking to a friend of mine who is a graphic designer, and said i think i may switch to mac, he said "your using a pc, your like the last one" hehe. but since then i've stuck to my guns on the pc and upgraded my system and this thing is so fast and very stable. on a tangent, i was using an adaptec scsi card and drives since i started using protools tdm system 4 or 5 years ago. when i rebuilt this system i decided to go against the digi rules. striping 4 7200 rpm ide drives with raid and have 460 gigs. these things fly. 64 tracks all day, and no heat issues, i have a silent liquid cooled system in an aluminum case. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[ricren]

Originally posted by Rail Jon Rogut:
I personally would format the drive for the native OS it's going to be used on the most. If the drivers (on both systems) are right.. everything should work fine.

Rail

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Still, there is no solution if you have a 120 GB FW HD that you use mostly in PC with XP, formated in NTSF, it will be no-readable on anny MAC , right?
If you want to partition with fat, you have the size limit.
We are screwed.

Chhers
Ric