[[email protected]]

Continuing my slow (and surprisingly patient, maybe even methodical)
saga of setting up
with the Optiplex .... it came with XP Pro, which uses NTFS . I
have an old 40g external drive that I just plugged in (just to see
what condition it's condition was in?) . It uses FAT 32, and since it
plays the old .wav files I stored there , I know the Opti will open
FAT 32 files, but will the external drive store NTFS files. Logic
tells me "no" but the rest of me tells me I don't know so I better
ask.


Dar

ps here's a little something a cyberfriend and I did. the guitar is
me . the duck(?) and electronica are Paul . And you all thought he
was a walrus ....
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page...?bandID=738132

Paul's at http://www.soundclick.com/stutteringmonks

I'm at http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page...?bandID=113986

[Nil]

On 18 Sep 2007, wrote in rec.audio.pro:

it came with XP Pro, which uses NTFS . I have an old 40g external
drive that I just plugged in (just to see what condition it's
condition was in?) . It uses FAT 32, and since it plays the old
.wav files I stored there , I know the Opti will open FAT 32
files, but will the external drive store NTFS files. Logic tells
me "no" but the rest of me tells me I don't know so I better ask.

There's no such thing as "FAT32 files" vs. "NTFS files". FAT32 and
NTFS are file systems that the operating system uses to store file.
Otherwise, files is files, and as long as the OS recognizes the disk
and it's file system and the files on it, your applications
shouldn't care what file system is in use.

[Peter Larsen]

Nil wrote:

On 18 Sep 2007, wrote in rec.audio.pro:

it came with XP Pro, which uses NTFS . I have an old 40g external
drive that I just plugged in (just to see what condition it's
condition was in?) . It uses FAT 32, and since it plays the old
.wav files I stored there , I know the Opti will open FAT 32
files, but will the external drive store NTFS files. Logic tells
me "no" but the rest of me tells me I don't know so I better ask.

FAT, including FAT32, and NTFS are disk formats, NTFS does allow
extended information to be saved with media-files - just noticed that
when copying some digital camera images from a ntfs partition to a
network fat32 drive, XP warned about information loss. Another
difference is that NTFS is transaction oriented and able to roll
unfinished transactions back, consequently it is much less likely to
loose file data in case of say a powercut during a move.

There's no such thing as "FAT32 files" vs. "NTFS files". FAT32 and
NTFS are file systems that the operating system uses to store file.
Otherwise, files is files, and as long as the OS recognizes the disk
and it's file system and the files on it, your applications
shouldn't care what file system is in use.

They should in case it matters, because max file size is limited to 4
gigabytes in FAT32 and to 64 terabytes in NTFS, this because NTFS uses
64 bit math. It doesn't matter for standard .wav files, they limited to
4 gigabytes anyway, but there are other wavefile formats around.


Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Arny Krueger]

wrote in message
ups.com
Continuing my slow (and surprisingly patient, maybe even
methodical) saga of setting up
with the Optiplex .... it came with XP Pro, which uses
NTFS . I have an old 40g external drive that I just
plugged in (just to see what condition it's condition was
in?) . It uses FAT 32, and since it plays the old .wav
files I stored there , I know the Opti will open FAT 32
files, but will the external drive store NTFS files.

Yes, XP will both read and write files on a FAT32 drive.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463

Has the MS story about what works and what doesn't.

The short answer is that XP won't format a partition larger than 32 GB on a
FAT32 drive during the XP install process, but otherwise most things you
want to do will work.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310561/

[David Morgan \(MAMS\)]

wrote in message ups.com...
Continuing my slow (and surprisingly patient, maybe even methodical)
saga of setting up with the Optiplex .... it came with XP Pro, which uses NTFS . I
have an old 40g external drive that I just plugged in (just to see
what condition it's condition was in?) . It uses FAT 32, and since it
plays the old .wav files I stored there , I know the Opti will open
FAT 32 files, but will the external drive store NTFS files. Logic
tells me "no" but the rest of me tells me I don't know so I better
ask.

It will store "files"... yes. ;-) (See: Peter)

Keep your audio in file sizes that are under a gigabyte, for safety's sake.
That's about 90 minutes in a single, contiguous file. You may never, ever,
have a reason to get close to that, but it's worth tossing out there.

DM

[Chris Whealy]

wrote:
Continuing my slow (and surprisingly patient, maybe even methodical)
saga of setting up
with the Optiplex .... it came with XP Pro, which uses NTFS . I
have an old 40g external drive that I just plugged in (just to see
what condition it's condition was in?) . It uses FAT 32, and since it
plays the old .wav files I stored there , I know the Opti will open
FAT 32 files, but will the external drive store NTFS files. Logic
tells me "no" but the rest of me tells me I don't know so I better
ask.

Well, this is like asking, "Can I take the file out the blue filing
cabinet and put it in the green filing cabinet?"
Sometimes "intuitive logic" is neither intuitive or logical.

FAT32 and NTFS are simply standardized ways of managing files on a
disk. Generically, these file management procedures are known as "File
Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system" and there are quite
a few of them around. Unix/Linux has half a dozen different file system
types, MACs have another and CDs have yet another

At the end of the day, a file is a file, irrespective of the management
technique used to store and retrieve that file from a disk drive.

Chris W

--
The voice of ignorance speaks loud and long,
But the words of the wise are quiet and few.
---

[Ty Ford]

On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 07:53:08 -0400, David Morgan \(MAMS\) wrote
(in article E48Ii.16216$mk2.15910@trnddc07):


wrote in message
ups.com...
Continuing my slow (and surprisingly patient, maybe even methodical)
saga of setting up with the Optiplex .... it came with XP Pro, which uses
NTFS . I
have an old 40g external drive that I just plugged in (just to see
what condition it's condition was in?) . It uses FAT 32, and since it
plays the old .wav files I stored there , I know the Opti will open
FAT 32 files, but will the external drive store NTFS files. Logic
tells me "no" but the rest of me tells me I don't know so I better
ask.

It will store "files"... yes. ;-) (See: Peter)

Keep your audio in file sizes that are under a gigabyte, for safety's sake.
That's about 90 minutes in a single, contiguous file. You may never, ever,
have a reason to get close to that, but it's worth tossing out there.

DM

Please excuse me for hijacking the thread, but I have a question.

I am a Mac user. I have a friend with a PC. We both have digi 002s.

He brought over his laptop and we tried to dump his session to one of my
external hard drives and to one of my usb sticks. At no time did the the PC
laptop recognize any of my media. We ended up burning CDs on the PC laptop
and importing the session.

So what's up with PCs that they don't recognize Mac USB or Firewire drives?

Regards,

Ty




--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZJ9MptZmU

[Peter Larsen]

Ty Ford wrote:

Please excuse me for hijacking the thread, but I have a question.

That's OK.

I am a Mac user. I have a friend with a PC. We both have digi 002s.

He brought over his laptop and we tried to dump his session
to one of my external hard drives and to one of my usb sticks.
At no time did the the PC laptop recognize any of my media.

Can't you format in FAT32?

We ended up burning CDs on the PC laptop
and importing the session.

So what's up with PCs that they don't recognize Mac USB
or Firewire drives?

Nothing, my asumption is that they just can't read the disk formatting.
Try rightclicking on "my computer", select "manage" and select "disk
manager", are the drives listed there? - what does it say about their
format?

Also ... take an empty drive, format it on the PC in FAT32 - 32 gigabyte
is the parition size limit for FAT32 in recent OS versions, use an
outdated version - always keep a Win9x computer around, preferably 98.2
- and you can format at least 64 gigabytes in FAT322. No Windows
household should be without partition magic anyway .... but I digress,
try and see whether a FAT32 external drive formatted from the PC will be
usable from the MAC.

Ty


Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Chris Whealy]

Ty Ford wrote:
He brought over his laptop and we tried to dump his session to one of
my external hard drives and to one of my usb sticks. At no time did
the the PC laptop recognize any of my media. We ended up burning CDs
on the PC laptop and importing the session.
The external drives used by the MAC will probably have been fomatted
using the HFS+ filesystem. This file system is a complete mystery to a
Windows based machine because Windows only knows about file systems like
FAT, FAT32 and NTFS. There are add-on programs that allow Windows to
have read-only access to other file systems (like EXT2 used by Linux),
but this software is non-standard and must be installed as an extra.

Since the topic of file systems seems to be a source of confusion for
quite a few people, I'll explain it by analogy.

Imagine you are an office administrator and you have to manage a large
quantity of paper files. You have an empty room joining your office
that has no furniture in it, so you decide to store your files in that
room. So you open the door, toss the file in and it lands somewhere on
the floor. You close the door and think, "Great, my file is safely
stored in my filing room".

It won't take long however, before your filing systems becomes a total
disaster because you have no system of managing the files once you have
put them in the filing room.

Now you have two options: either you can invent your own filining
system and manage the files yourself, or you can hire an experienced
filing clerk to do the job for you. Since you've got a million other
things to do, you decide to hire a filing clerk.

The new clerk shows up and brings with him some empty filing cabinets
and installs them in the room, and then takes up his position at the
door of the filing room. He doesn't allow anyone into his filing room
because he doesn't want his system messed up. But this is no problem
because the guy is super-efficient. You ask him for a file, he
disappears off into the room and seconds later comes back with the right
file.

Then when you finished with the file you leave it in his in-tray, and
before you know it, its disappeared back into the filing room.

The filing room is like the hard disk, and you (the office
administrator) are like the Operating System. You are responsible for
the data to day running of the office (I.E. the computer) and you are
happy to delegate the task of file management to a dedicated clerk.

The filing clerk is like the file system on your hard disk. The file
system knows how the files are arranged and managed on the hard disk,
and when ever a request is made for a particular file, it disappears off
to the correct location on the disk and retrieves the data.

Now to go back to your question about incompatibility between MAC and PC
filesystems, imagine that you arrive at the office one day and you see a
door into a new filing room that was never there before (someone has
plugged in a new hard drive). You think "Great, I've got a new place to
store my files".

Tiny detail... You only speak English

So you open the door to this new filing room, and there's the clerk
sitting there ready to help. And you ask him to tell you what files
he's got in that room - and he just looks blankly at you.

Tiny detail... He only speaks Spanish

This is exactly the type of incompatibility that exists when you plug an
HFS+ formatted hard drive into a PC. To go back to the office analogy,
unless you have an interpreter to translate your requests into Spanish,
the filing clerk will be unable to understand your requests.

I hope that makes things clearer?

Chris W

--
The voice of ignorance speaks loud and long,
But the words of the wise are quiet and few.
---

[Marc Wielage]

On Sep 19, 2007, Ty Ford commented:

So what's up with PCs that they don't recognize Mac USB or Firewire drives?
------------------------------snip------------------------------

Because Windows XP and Vista weren't designed to recognize Mac HFS+ formatted
drives. (I could also argue that it's because Microsoft is a bigotted,
rotten company, but that's just a personal opinion.)

One solution is to use Mediafour's MacDrive:

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

which is a program you install on the Windows computer, and it allows the
Windows machine to mount, access, write, and copy to and from a Mac drive.

Macs can read both FAT32 and NTFS drives, but (at the moment) they can only
write and format FAT32 drives. Apparently, writing and formatting NTFS has
been too low a priority for Apple to fix in their current OS. This is one of
many things on a long list of OSX problems that make me crazy.

--MFW

[anahata]

Marc Wielage wrote:

Macs can read both FAT32 and NTFS drives, but (at the moment) they can only
write and format FAT32 drives. Apparently, writing and formatting NTFS has
been too low a priority for Apple to fix in their current OS. This is one of
many things on a long list of OSX problems that make me crazy.

To be fair, it's not Apple's fault. Microsoft refuse to publish the spec
for NTFS so it has to be reverse engineered, and it's not simple.

Linux has the same problem: reading NTFS is OK, writing to it is
dangerous and NTFS volumes are mounted read-only by default.

--
Anahata
-+- http://www.treewind.co.uk
Home: 01638 720444 Mob: 07976 263827

[Romeo Rondeau[_2_]]

Ty Ford wrote:
On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 07:53:08 -0400, David Morgan \(MAMS\) wrote
(in article E48Ii.16216$mk2.15910@trnddc07):

wrote in message
ups.com...
Continuing my slow (and surprisingly patient, maybe even methodical)
saga of setting up with the Optiplex .... it came with XP Pro, which uses
NTFS . I
have an old 40g external drive that I just plugged in (just to see
what condition it's condition was in?) . It uses FAT 32, and since it
plays the old .wav files I stored there , I know the Opti will open
FAT 32 files, but will the external drive store NTFS files. Logic
tells me "no" but the rest of me tells me I don't know so I better
ask.
It will store "files"... yes. ;-) (See: Peter)

Keep your audio in file sizes that are under a gigabyte, for safety's sake.
That's about 90 minutes in a single, contiguous file. You may never, ever,
have a reason to get close to that, but it's worth tossing out there.

DM

Please excuse me for hijacking the thread, but I have a question.

I am a Mac user. I have a friend with a PC. We both have digi 002s.

He brought over his laptop and we tried to dump his session to one of my
external hard drives and to one of my usb sticks. At no time did the the PC
laptop recognize any of my media. We ended up burning CDs on the PC laptop
and importing the session.

So what's up with PCs that they don't recognize Mac USB or Firewire drives?

Regards,

Ty

PC's need another piece of software to read the MAC partition, unless
you format in FAT32. Don't feel bad MACs can't write NTFS without the
same thing either :-)