A month or so back I bought a Western Digital external hard disk. I have used it up until now only with my iBook for my photo’s. I made 2 partition on it using Disk Utility and it has worked fine until now.
I decided to hook it up on my PC to save some heavy files. That’s when I learned that Windows won’t read an Apple partition. I always thought it wouldn’t be a problem. So after many trying, asking my pal Paul for help and Googling I came with a solution. So for my own future record:
How to use an external HD on both Apple and Windows
- Allocate and format the hard disk as NTFS on Windows
- Partition the hard disk on Apple using Apple Journaling file system
- Get [MacDrive](http://www.mediafour.com /products/macdrive6/) for Windows
- Load the hard disk on Windows, open MacDrive and choose ‘View Mac disks in My Computer’
- All Apple disks will have an Apple image…Done
Try this at your own risk. Formatting a disk will erase everything.
I’ve used this method for the last few hours and it has worked well. I rather not share the hard disk through the network because it’s slower. So I just hook up the hard disk to my PC when I need to save files on it. I only save photo’s, music, movies and documents so I don’t have problems with files compatibilities between Apple and Windows.
More on MacDrive
[MacDrive](http://www.mediafour.com /products/macdrive6/) is a very handy application. I’m surprised I haven’t read about it before. With MacDrive you can view Mac disks, burn a Mac DVD or CD and partition a Mac disk. Doesn’t seems like a lot but it’s a very handy tool and also easy. No difficult configurations or anything.
