My External Disk and the Mac

[judge]

I was file sharing with a Mac yesterday from my NTFS formatted external drive, the Mac was happy to lap up my files but wasn't able to give me any in return.

I think this is due to Mac's not liking NTFS and if I want to allow a Mac to write to it, it needs to be FAT or FAT32. Is this the case?

If so I can see no way in XP's disk manager to format the drive in anything other than NTFS.

Do I need a proprietory disk utility like Partition Magic or is there another way?

Answers on a postcard to...

I need to do this to redress the balance of the file share as so far the Mac user is better off than I am

 

[shugie]

Does the command line format command work on the external drive? That allows selection of FAT or NTFS

 

[judge]

Does the command line format command work on the external drive? That allows selection of FAT or NTFS

Cannot be seen from Command prompt

 

[ianf]

The way round it is to connect the external drive to a windows server, and then share it. Connect to the volume with the finder's go:connect to server: command and use the smb://hostname/share path, validating using the account on the pc.

NTFS volumes are mounted read only on the mac if they are local (physically connected) filesystems.

You should be able to delete a volume in LDM on the pc (logical disk manager) to remove a partition and then create a new one subject to a few rules.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310525/EN-US/

I'll have a look at this on w2k3 tomorrow.