External HD conundrum

Here's the problem and hope someone can help me out. I was sent 2 250 Western Digital externals by a footage house. I then went through hundreds of hours of tape, re logging and capturing, naming and separating by species into a hundred or so folders all the decent underwater footage I had. I made a backup on one of the hard drives and sent the other off with about 232 gigs of footage. I found out later that they couldn't open the hard drive since it was formated to Macs. (You'd think they would know how to do that but..)

They sent it back and I brought it to a friends PC who did a quick reformat. He is not an editor and only does word docs and the like. We opened it on his computer and put some things on the newly reformated Western Digital and it worked fine. I brought it home, connected it to the other Mac Formated hd so as to re copy the footage. The PC formated drive comes up on my monitor but I cannot delete what is on there or drag folders over to it. When I did a 'get info', under 'ownership and permissions, it says Read Only and formated to Windows NT Filesystem.

I know nothing about PCs but I need to be able to transfer the data over from the Mac Formated Western Digital to the PC one and haven't a clue. Help me, I'm drowning.

Steve B)

Well, perhaps you need to use the nuclear option...

Open Disk Utility

(Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility)

Disconnect your mac formatted external disk to protect it from accidental erasure.

Select the NTFS disk in the disk utility window, then select ERASE

Choose MS-DOS file system from the popup menu (see attached image)

The disk will be erased and formatted with MS-DOS file system.

The mac OS should now be able to see the disk and copy to it, while the other people also should be able to see it and read from it.

Craig,

You're a lifesaver. It's all copying fine now. I just hope that the footage house will not have any problems opening it but, from what very little I know of PCs, Fat 32 is what is needed. Much appreciation

Steve

FAT 32 has a file size limit of 4 GIGS

NTFS is unlimited.

Wags, like I said, I don't know a thing about PCs. I followed Craigs instructions and it seems to be copying fine. Just did a command/I and it says that the PC formatted drive is MS/Dos Fat 32. Its almost full with 232gigs of footage, a lot more than 4 gigs. Guess I just don't understand PCs. Macs are so much easier for me.-Steve B)hd_info.tiff

You must have a heap of single little clips none over 4 GIGs then I suppose.

Try sending a 4+ GIG single clip and see what happens.

Being a PC/Mac guy, boy have i suffered with this..especially trying to create a cross-platform back up solution. IN the end, FAT32 was all i could do...and no files greater than 4gig are backed up:( That means all my backed up production videos:(

Mine were all footage clips in species separate folders which I brought over from one external to the other( the the folders were huge in size, no edited productions, just raw footage for sale. I just hope they can open things. But now you have taught me something else...if I understand correctly, if I had had a single clip more than 4 gigs, than that would not have copied over.

Steve B)