Will a firewire drive that works with Macs using both OS X and OS 9 be able to be recognized by a PC running Windows XP? I have a Lacia Pocketdrive with firewire interface that works with Macs. I have it now hooked up to my desktop, which is running Windows XP. In the systray, I see an option to “Safely Remove Lacie 1394 Disk etc.” However, when I go to My Computer, the drive doesn’t show up. Looking in the device manager, under the Disk Drive tab, I can see my hard drive and the pocket drive listed. Is there any way other than through the My Computer interface for me to access the drive’s contents? It seems like the computer knows the drive is there, but it just can’t show it to me. I tried updating the driver but was told the current driver is the best one. Is the problem the formatting of the drive? Does OS X/OS 9 use a format that Windows can’t see? Thanks for the help.
AFAIK PCs can’t read your MAC’s FAT. Firewire works just fine under XP (I have a matrox firewire drive) but the File Allication Tables are probably not recongised. Can you check under your drive management icon and check if the drive is found (should say something like “unknown device”? If it is, you could format it but that’ll just negate the whole point.
I don’t know anything about macs. Is there a patch that makes XP see macs?
In disk management, it shows my hard drive and another Not-Initialized, Non-Allocated drive. So I assume XP can’t read it. Although, in the disk drives section of the device manager, the full name “LaCie Group SA LaCie 1394 Disk Drive LUN 0 IEEE 1394 SBP2 Device” shows up along with my hard drive. I hope there’s a patch that can convert the contents without reformatting the drive. Alternatively, is there a universal formatting protocol that can be read by both platforms?
I think there are several products that let windows support mac disks. I know I’ve used a product called “MacDisk” in the past that let me mount mac Zip disks on a windows machine.
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
That’s not the only product out there that can do this, though.
An alternate solution would be to format the firewire drive as a FAT32 disk. I know both windows and macs can support that. That would mean, of course, reformatting the drive and then copying everything back.
Great. Thanks. Exactly what I was looking for. 