I've been handing drives off to producers for a while now, but recently ran into an issue that has me stumped.
In the field I use a mac to copy, back up and write the video to a Lacie Rugged drive for the producer. A recent client uses PC based avid, so I formatted the drive NTFS with "Paragon NTFS for Mac", checked the drive on the mac side of my macbook and sent it away.
They couldn't open the drive in windows, the "manage tab" wanted to initialize the drive.
Any ideas for a bulletproof way to make sure the take away drive will open in windows, or am I going to have to open windows in VMWare, format and copy it via usb there?

NTFS should open on Windows. Fat32 can work as that's what SxS cards are and the files keep to the 4GB limit but NTFS should work. Did you check the drive with WMWare and Windows or Bootcamp Windows? NTFS should work.

Did you upgrade your Mac to Snow Leopard? The Paragon website seems to indicate that the current version does not support 10.6, but there is a beta available for the next release if you're willing to experiment with beta code.

HTH

I have not yet upgraded to Snow Leopard. The NTFS drive opened fine on the Mac, since it said "NTFS" under the info tab I figured it would open.
WHen I named the drive while formatting with Paragon I used a "mac style name", not a drive letter; maybe that is part of the problem.
I'm about to do some experimenting, but I only have Windows under VMware, not sure if that will make a difference - it shouldn't but who knows?

If you plug in the drive when VMware is the topmost application, then VMware will "own" the device and it will attempt to mount the filesystem under Windows (and OS X will not). I do this all the time with various USB devices and drives when a Windows app needs direct access to the device. If you plug in a device when VMware is not the top application, then OS X will get it and it won't be available to VMware - although drives are available via file sharing if that's enabled in VMware.

If it mounts with Windows under VMware, then it *should* mount on a PC.