Removable Media WinXP to MAC

[Poppa_Meth]

A friend of mine asked me about ZIP drives today before buying one for her boyfriend. He asked for one, but she points out that he has a MAC at home and a WinXP machine at work. I don't use my old ZIP very often and I never have messed with MAC but I know ZIP disks come formatted for IMB or MAC just like diskettes. So I'm wondering if it is possible for the MAC to access the files on the IBM formatted disks? Like I said, I'm not too familiar with MAC so I'm not sure if the OS has features that enable accessing Windows files in this manner or not. Also, if ZIP won't work, how about a pen drive? Any problems using those between a PC and MAC, or is there a specific formatting it would have to have?

[redwudz]

All the newer Macs can read IBM formatted disks. I've used a Zip drive between my Mac and PC. Of course the Mac won't run any PC programs, but to open video files, jpegs and the like there's no problem.

I would go with a pen drive/USB flash drive instead, though. My Zip drives mostly set on a shelf because they are getting outdated. A USB drive would be a better choice. Unless he needs a Zip drive for transferring files to another computer with the same drive?

[Poppa_Meth]

I just talked to her again. She screwed up. It was a JumpDrive she was looking at, not a ZIP drive. So either way I guess it should work fine. Thanks.

[Forum Troll]

Just make sure that the drive is formatted as FAT, not HFS. That way both the PC and Mac can read it. If it's formatted as HFS, the PC can't read it.

[rallynavvie]

Well a PC can read HFS is you use an HFS reader like MacDrive. We have that on all our PCs at work for interoperability with older Mac disks. OSX seems to format disks in UDF now so it works between the two. I haven't tried formatting a USB drive on OSX yet, I'd assume it's smart enough to format in FAT32 like all USB drives are formatted from the factory. But since they all are preformatted as such you shouldn't need to worry about it unless something goes wrong with the drive down the road and you do have to reformat.

[Poppa_Meth]

I'll mention that to her. I'm assuming all FAT file systems work then? I've had several drives come from the factory with different formatting, some in 16 some in 32.