Scott Auerbach
June 11th, 2006, 01:54 PM
A heads-up on something that's probably noted somewhere on the board, but I'd never run across before...
I bought a 250GB external drive to offload media (via MacBook Pro) in the field. However, once the media was on the drive, it had to connect to an Avid (running on XP) for the edit.
Without MacOpener loaded on the XP machine (it wasn't, in this case), xp won't recognize a mac-formatted (i.e., HFS) drive. If you format the drive using xp, it's going to format it as NTFS, which means you have read-only capability on OS X, no matter what permissions you set on xp when you format the drive. As far as I can tell, the ONLY way to make this work is to choose both "PC partitioning scheme" AND MS-DOS formatting in OS X, then format the drive on the mac. This creates a FAT 32 drive that both machines will read and can write to.
This is less than thoroughly documented, shall we say, on both the Apple and the Windows sides. Given that this was happening the night before a big shoot (other work had eaten up the time I'd planned to do this earlier in the week), it was a less-than-wonderful way to spend most of the time I should've been sleeping.
I bought a 250GB external drive to offload media (via MacBook Pro) in the field. However, once the media was on the drive, it had to connect to an Avid (running on XP) for the edit.
Without MacOpener loaded on the XP machine (it wasn't, in this case), xp won't recognize a mac-formatted (i.e., HFS) drive. If you format the drive using xp, it's going to format it as NTFS, which means you have read-only capability on OS X, no matter what permissions you set on xp when you format the drive. As far as I can tell, the ONLY way to make this work is to choose both "PC partitioning scheme" AND MS-DOS formatting in OS X, then format the drive on the mac. This creates a FAT 32 drive that both machines will read and can write to.
This is less than thoroughly documented, shall we say, on both the Apple and the Windows sides. Given that this was happening the night before a big shoot (other work had eaten up the time I'd planned to do this earlier in the week), it was a less-than-wonderful way to spend most of the time I should've been sleeping.