Member Avatar for Proost

Hello all-

I am kind of a Mac newbie, so please bear with me. I am looking at purchasing a used ibook G4 from a friend that is is running the "panther" OS. Currently, I have a windows based PC with an NTFS formatted USB 2.0 external hard drive that I would to use with the iBook. I was told it should work. The problem is that when I plug it into the iBook I can only see 12 of the 26 folders on the drive. The iBook shows that all 104 gigs are used on the drive, but I can't view all the files.

Any ideas???? Otherwise, I really like the iBook, but if Ican't see files from my PC it won't work for me. Thanks in advance.

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Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

It is possible that some of the folders are named so that the Mac is having a hard time seeing it. Are there any spaces or illegal characters in the Windows folder names that the Mac is rejecting? For directory names, stay away from Special characters like !*&^#*&!^ inside them. Also note that you may have excessivly long folder names, and that could cause a problem too.

Other than that, you could try to network the computers together with Ethernet. In that case, the PC would have your large external drive, and your Mac would see the files through the share management.

Christian

Member Avatar for Proost

Hello,

It is possible that some of the folders are named so that the Mac is having a hard time seeing it. Are there any spaces or illegal characters in the Windows folder names that the Mac is rejecting? For directory names, stay away from Special characters like !*&^#*&!^ inside them. Also note that you may have excessivly long folder names, and that could cause a problem too.

Other than that, you could try to network the computers together with Ethernet. In that case, the PC would have your large external drive, and your Mac would see the files through the share management.

Christian

Thanks Christian!! That is the most helpful suggestion I have gotten from a total of four boards. Most people have told me to just wipe the drive and start over with it formatted for Mac which would not work for me.

Folder names: I will check, but the Folders in the top directory are Music, Video, and Pictures.

The issues are primarily with the Music folder. The folders are labeled A-Z. I can see folder J and folders P-Z, thats it. Inside those folders I can't see some of the filenames are very long and include some special characters. Could that stop the mac from seeing the entire folder?

I will try accessing the drive over the network and see what happens. Thanks!

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