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Old to New, New to Old
I have a client that wants a hard drive to work both on his new macbook pro as well as with his old pc laptop (not sure exactly how old). I got a g-tech drive and formatted to MS-DOS, and after copying a few 50MB files over, that seemed to work great. I then tried to copy a 8GB file onto the drive, and I got an error saying the file was too big for the drive format.
Thinking this could have to do with the flash drive I was using, I tried copying the file onto the Macbook Pro, then drag/drop from mac into the HD as it worked with the smaller files, and same error. Never seen this before. Can someone please advise on how to properly set up this HD to work on both laptops and accept all size files? Or if it’s not possible please let me know?
Thanks
EricEric Klassen
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3 Replies
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Hello,
The FAT32 format has file limitations; there is no way around it. It will work for both Mac and PC but as you are finding there are limitations on file size.
I’d recommend using exFAT format. It will work for both if your OS is up to date.
“exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) is a proprietary file system designed especially for flash drives developed by Microsoft, which has applied for patent protection. It is supported in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 with update KB955704, Windows Embedded CE 6.0, Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008,[5] Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 (except Windows Server 2008 Server Core), Mac OS X Snow Leopard starting from 10.6.5, Mac OS X Lion and Mac OS X Mountain Lion.”
From the Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
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In other words, if the PC has Windows XP service pack 2 or above, it should work.
The new Macbook pro should work fine since it’s new.
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There are more options too.
This article doesn’t mention the one I did, but will give you some other options. People in the comments section mention exFAT though.
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