data hard drive share between vista and osx?

[SpiffyChee]

I would love to make a 500gb hard drive accessible and editable through both vista and osx.

 

one of my wishes is to share the same itunes library. I also have a few hundred gigs of videos that I would like to be able to use in either os?

 

I dont know how to search for something like this, so if someone could let me know if its possible and point me in the right direction?

[relay]

Put the drive on a network and share it out.

 

Enjoy!

[jdratlif]

In my experience, this depends on several factors.

 

First, only Vista 64-bit can boot from GPT, so if you're using EFI with GPT partition scheme, then you must have 64-bit Vista. Since I don't own a copy of Vista for my desktop, I'm not too familiar with how to set this up.

 

Second, Mac cannot write to NTFS partitions. It doesn't have this capability built-in. I hear there is a Mac port of the ntfs-3g driver from Linux that will allow read-write access, but I have not tested it.

 

I have two hard drives in my desktop, and am triple booting Windows XP 32-bit, Linux, and Leopard. I have it setup as follows:

 

My main drive is an SATA 500 GB. It was partitioned with Leopard as GPT and has pc-efi v9 installed. Leopard is the first partition (after the hidden EFI partition), and Linux uses the remainder of the drive.

 

My seoncd drive is an older IDE 120 GB. It was partitioned with Windows (MBR). It has three primary partitions. The first one is a 15 GB Windows XP partition formatted NTFS. The second is a 20 GB FAT32 partition. The third covers the rest of the drive and is NTFS formatted.

 

Since Linux and Windows can write to NTFS, and all three can read it, I keep everything I want to share on this partition. This includes for instance my music, which I can play in iTunes under Leopard or Audacious under Linux. I don't really use Windows much, but I haven't been able to get tv out working properly under anything else, and if I needed to run some program under Windows at some time, it's handy to have it there. 15 GB isn't much of a sacrifice for this cause.

 

The FAT32 partition is the annoying compromise. Everything can read/write FAT32. So I dump anything there I want to share from Mac to the other two systems. Linux can read HFS+, but can't write to it. Windows can't read or write HFS+. The really annoying part about FAT32 is that no file can be larger than 4 GB. This means you can't put DVD images there.

 

If you had an old machine that could sit there with the hard drive and act as a network share, it's the most compatible, but it's also the slowest solution. Probably the best solution is to try the ntfs-3g driver. I saw it on the XxX 10.5.6 PPF3 install disc, but I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere.