Windows and Mac – File Sharing, External Hard Drive
As I have just recently acquired my very own Mac, among the first things I had to figure out was how I could share files between the mac and my laptop which runs Windows Vista.
I have an external hard drive , 320GB Western Digital Elements - I was hoping that I could use it for both and actually feel so stupid I even tried.
Formatting the external drive on the mac would be a breeze - no problem. Using the Apple Disk Utility, I erased the current partition (in NTFS format) and created a new one in Fat32 format. This took only a few seconds and there was no problem copying large files from mac to the external drive.
We, however, cannot copy large files from a windows machine - this is the problem. Although Windows recognizes the whole capacity of the external drive (way beyond the FAT32 limit of 32GB), it fails to copy files which are more than 4GB.
Doing this the other way around - formatting the external drive in Windows (yes, I tried it out of desperation) - was an even worse experience.
Though the option to format in Fat32 is not an option in the windows formatting tool, I still went on with it from the command line:
format /FS:FAT32 X:
where X is the drive letter assigned to the external drive.
Don't bother doing this. The process would take hours only to tell you in the end, upon reaching 99% and waiting for hours, that formatting could not continue as the drive is too large for Fat32.
My other option is file sharing. I often stay away from this in fear of worms and viruses but if I do it on the mac, maybe (I hope) it would be OK.
To share a folder in a Mac:
- From System Preferences, go to Internet and Wireless >> Sharing.
- Check 'File Sharing' and then add the folder which is to be shared. (Clicking the + sign would allow you to select folders).
- Click options. Select either (2) sharing via FTP or (3) sharing via SMB.
Just to satisfy my curiosity and complete this post, I tried sharing a folder in my windows machine. For the mac to connect to it, follow these steps:
- From Finder, select Go >> Connect to Server
- In the server address type "smb://192.168.x.xxx"