Mike Jones Digital Basin
screen media rinse cycle

Circumventing MAC/WIN hard drive format incompatability

One of the  last great pains in the arse for PC Mac compatibility is Hard Drive format. Where virtually all other hurdles of cross platform compatibility have been leveled over the past few years, Hard Drive format remains a significant obstacle.

The native format for the  Mac is HFS+ and for reasons best known to Microsoft drives formatted in HFS+ cannot be read, written to or even seen by a Windows OS.

The native format for Windows is NTFS and for reasons best known to Apple NTFS drive can be opened and read from on the Mac but cannot be written to. This is obviously a better situation than HFS+ on Windows but still dysfunctional.

The much older FAT32 hard drive format is fully cross platform but comes with a highly problematic short coming; 4gb file size  limit for individual files. Since a simple 5min lossless 422 video file will exceed this FAT32 is simply not functional for video producers.

All is  not lost however and simple freeware utility might be the answer to your cross platform woes. HFSXplorer allows  for HFS+ formatted drives to be mounted and seen on Windows and files copied over to a local NTFS partition or drive.

Until Microsoft and Apple cease their pissing contest this simple software is a very effective solution for cross platform file transportation; especially for those running BootCamp.

Posted at 11:00PM Mar 25, 2008 by Mike Jones in technology  |  Comments[2]