July 16, 2005

Digital George: Help with hard drives. I have ~100 GB of music to transfer from a Windows computer to an orphaned 160 GB HD. I want to get an enclosure for the 160 GB hard drive and use it as an external drive on an iBook that I plan to buy next time Apple updates the line. What are my options?

It would be nice if I could access the music files from a PC as well, but it's not necessary. So what's the easiest way to transfer them and keep the whole mess compatible? Firewire/USB 2.0 isn't an issue -- both machines can use either one. And kinda-sorta related: is there a way for me to take iTunes metadata (play counts, etc.) from the Windows computer to the Mac?

posted by Smo 19 years ago
  • First, there are plenty of FW or USB hard drive enclosures that'll work. WiebeTech makes a lot of them. Really, get any one you like, and that should work well. If you want to transfer the information, be sure to get the XML file iTunes makes, it should be right in the iTunes directory. That should transfer all the metadata fine. Alternately, I suspect there are several programs designed to do just what you want.
  • If I can copy/paste the XML file from one to the other, then that part's a cinch. But what about the format of the external drive? If I format the drive with a Windows machine, will a Mac be able to read it? And if I format it with a Mac, will the Windows machine be able to read it?
  • Here's some discussion on the topic. Your biggest problem is, as you suspect, likely to be the disc formatting; this page discusses the support for various filesystems under MacOS X. FAT32 is the best common denominator between the two, but while WinXP can certainly mount and read/write a 160GB FAT32 formatted disc, it can only create 32 GB FAT32 partitions (see here, which is a bit of a bitch. For bigger, it wants NTFS, which is read-only to your Mac. So, perversely enough, you'll want to use your Mac to format the disc so Windows can use it; see this article on how.
  • Great links there. Thanks. One thing, though. That Microsoft link says there's no real limit to how large a FAT32 volume can be with XP. But the last link mentions that MacOS X can read FAT32 volumes only as large as 128 GB. Is that still the case with Tiger? If so, would/could I partition the drive to use the rest of it with MacOS X, then? (The internal rhymes are unintentional, honest.)
  • A Linux Live CD will also let you create a FAT32 partion past the 32 gigabyte mark which you can then format in Windows, if that would be any easier. I just did this the other day (with a partition, not a hard-drive) so I could share music between Linux and Windows.
  • My external HDD is formatted with a UDF filesystem because my computer is running GNU/Linux but I wanted to have a file system that any recent OS could read. I haven't tried to read it using any other OS, though. Both Windows and OS X can read DVDs which also use UDF so technically they should be able to do so.
  • I would suggest getting a USB and Firewire case if you're getting a mac as the mac can boot from a firewire drive, but of course the drive would have to be mac formatted in that case. One solution to both this and the 128MB limit would be to partition the drive. I would do this using a mac, and format the first (smaller) partition for mac (HFS+). This gives you one bootable partition and one data partition. Ideally you keep a clone of your mac's drive on the bootable partition (the free silverkeeper or carboncopy cloner utilities do this easily). In the event of a crash of the systems HD you simply boot of the external and clone the system back onto the new drive.
  • Have you thought about a linksys NLSU2? I plan to get one as I am roughly in the same boat with my PC/gf's powerbook. Right now all the media files are on a dedicated drive on the PC which is getting full - she accesses them via a share. You'll need a network and this will add to the cost but is expandable (and hackable!)
  • doublesix: Ohhhh. NLSU2 looks sexy. You've just made me spend more of my money to feed my technofetish.
  • NLSU2 I have one. It works as advertised, though it's slow. Note that it uses a non-Windows, non-Mac disk format (Linux ext2 or ext3, I think) for its drives, so you won't be able to remove a drive from the NLSU2 and plug it back into your Win or Mac box for direct data access.
  • I'm leaning toward sfred's solution, but I have probably a few weeks to decide. Anyway, y'all are very helpful. Thanks a lot.