external drive jumper settings

[bazookaman]

do we prefer master, slave or cable select? Is there a right or wrong?

[Ken Sp.]

Master has always worked for me.
I bet Cable Select will work in some newer enclosure.

[bazookaman]

ok, this pertains to my original post. Basically i have a PC guy here who just put a 120GB seagate into an external enclosure. I need to access it on my Mac. So he formatted it on his PC. When i plug it into my Mac, it shows up fine, but when i try to copy something to it, i get the following error...

[olnacl]

Sounds like he formatted it NTFS which you can read on a Mac but not write. Needs to be FAT 32 to write from a Mac.

[olnacl]

And you're limited to 32GB partitions if formatting the drive from 2K or XP. Aftermarket formatting tools work for partition sizes larger than 32GB (Partition Magic, for one)

[bazookaman]

So what your saying is that he has a 120 gb drive, but can only format 32 gb of it if he wants me to be able to copy to it?

Could he perhaps use the seagate utility that came with the drive to format all 120 gb so i can see it?

[Racer X]

olnacl is 100% correct. To read/write to a drive that Windows can use, you need to format it as FAT 16 or FAT32. To format a drive as FAT32 beyond 32 gigs, you need 3rd party software, or Windows ME or earlier. M$ is forcing you to use NTFS in effect, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing. They just don't give you a choice.

[Racer X]

And for some reason that I have as yet to figure out, when you format a FW drive as DOS under OS X, many Windows machines still can't use it. I have 3 different drives, and 2 different machines with 3 total OS X installs, and none can format any of the drives so my Dull laptop running XP or a lunchbox system running Win2K or XP can "see".

The Seagate utility may do the trick.

[bazookaman]

Well I formatted it on my Mac as a DOS disk and he was able to recognize it on his PC. So we'll see how far that goes.

[olnacl]

A little late, but the deal with using 2K or XP to format the drive is that the partition can be no larger than 32GB. You can create multiple partitions to use the capacity of the drive, but I really wouldn't bother - rather pop for some formatting software to do the entire drive as FAT32. The software will come in handy many times, I'm sure. Dunno if the Seagate software will allow formatting in FAT32, but if it does, that's the way to go. I've tried formatting in DOS on the Mac, but my results haven't been stellar - I'll look into the suggestion made above about formatting the Drive rather than the Volume on the Mac - that could be the answer - I just don't remember how I did it as I just use Partition Magic on a PC to format anything other than NTFS.