My MP3s are stuck on an HFS file system, I want them accessible in Windows Vista

May 8, 2008 12:38 PM

The desired end result: I want to move mp3s that are currently on an iBook (working, but with busted screen) onto an external drive which will be accessible from a machine running Windows Vista. Bonus points if it is equally accessible for *nix, OS X, and Windows machines. Details inside.

I'm a software developer so I shouldn't be asking this question, but I've been very busy for a number of months and just haven't had time to research the problem.

I have an old iBook (running panther) where many mp3s (and other files) are stored. It has a broken screen and is no longer used anymore. My current machine is a Dell laptop (Latitude D830) with Windows Vista.

I can boot the iBook and access files through firewire using another mac.

I have a 750GB external drive that was originally formatted with NTFS or the like. However, I obviously can not write to it from OS X.

I am able to boot Ubuntu on the Mac but I was unsuccessful in formatting the external drive to any other file system - it would appear to work, but my Dell laptop would not see the partition (let alone read/write) and OS X can't read/write happily to them either.

I was finally able to format to UFS through OSX, thinking that I could at least get to the files using Ubuntu on my dell machine. Unfortunately, Ubuntu refuses to boot properly on my Dell.

I downloaded the Ubuntu install disc (latest version from a few weeks ago) and tested it at work while hooked up to a Dell docking station with two Dell flatpanels connected, and it booted up. Every other time I have tried to boot into Ubuntu it has frozen up instead - always when untethered, leading me to believe it has something to do with the lcd on the laptop that may be causing a hardware issue.

What's the simplest, least painful thing to do here?

posted by mbatch to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Connect external HD to Vista machine. Share it over network. Open share on Other Mac, which does firewire access to old machine. Copy-paste.

To get better accessibility across OSs, you don't want NTFS. You could use something like this utility I randomly googled up, or maybe OS X's Disk Utility, to make that external drive FAT32. While there are semi-trustworthy NTFS-write drivers for *nix and OS X, FAT32's still your best way to go universal.
posted by Tomorrowful at 12:46 PM on May 8, 2008

An easy way to let all your computers access your music within your network is to setup apache with the musicindex module. There are packages available in debian/ubuntu for easy installation, or you can build the module yourself on your mac. There are a few postings on the ubuntu forums about configuring apache, which should be some what similar to how the configuration should look on your mac, if you install it there.

Just to note, this will play many file types, including: mp3, flac, ogg, mp4/aac. It supports searching, playlists and lots of things to make it feel like these files aren't being streamed. This might be a little more involved than loading up a removable drive, but i find it works very well and I don't have to mess with moving a drive around.
posted by chrisroberts at 1:09 PM on May 8, 2008

Tomorrowful is dead-on: you want to format that drive FAT32. It works on my work computer, my Ubuntu box at home, and a friend of mine's slightly older iBook. It'll do what you need.

This is easy in Linux. Just go into the terminal and

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

(or whatever your device is) and follow the prompts to delete the old partition and make a new one. Then exit fdisk and save changes (I think the key command is w). Then, once you've got that empty partition, make the FAT file system:

sudo mkfs -t FAT32 /dev/sda

...and that's it. Simple as pie.
posted by Viomeda at 1:37 PM on May 8, 2008

It works on my work computer, my Ubuntu box at home, and a friend of mine's slightly older iBook.

Gah, I mean I have a drive on which it works on all those things. Y'know those USB drives that work everywhere? FAT32.
posted by Viomeda at 1:38 PM on May 8, 2008

Install TransMac 30-day trial on Vista machine. Plug iBook into Vista machine with firewire. Copy files with TransMac.

I've only used TransMac to get files off of HFS+ disk images successfully, but not physical drives. The product page says it can though.
posted by easyasy3k at 2:19 PM on May 8, 2008

I'm not sure why you are futzing with Ubuntu. Sounds like you have a working and a deadish mac. Take the working mac and format the new drive. You'll need to partition it in DOS/MBR format with one DOS/FAT32 partition. Once formatted, you can obviously test it out on your vista and ubuntu setups. Then copy the stuff from the old mac, booted in FireWire target mode.
posted by chairface at 5:05 PM on May 8, 2008

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

Macdrive will allow you to access your HFS via windows explorer. The drives will show up in My Computer with little apple icons.
posted by passtehbrainz at 5:15 PM on May 8, 2008

If you need to move a single drive around between win/mac/nix computers, FAT32 is the way to go, but for the love of Clapton maintain backups on a drive that stays on a single machine and uses it's native filesystem.
posted by waxboy at 5:21 PM on May 8, 2008

An *internal* drive at that.
posted by waxboy at 5:29 PM on May 8, 2008

Also be aware that you will run into difficulty if you attempt to store files larger than 2GB on a FAT file system. In theory the FAT32 limit is 4GB but there are lots of FAT32 implementations that impose a 2GB limit instead.

If you're formatting an external drive for use with Windows, it needs to have just one partition, and the partition table must be in DOS format, not GPT format. If your external drive shows up in Ubuntu as /dev/sdc, the following commands will create a single partition on it and format it FAT32:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M count=1 #wipe first megabyte of whole drive, including partition table
sudo cfdisk /dev/sdc #use this to create a new partition table, with a single partition of type 0C (FAT32 LBA) that fills the drive and is marked bootable
sudo mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdc1 #note /dev/sdc1, not /dev/sdc
posted by flabdablet at 6:37 PM on May 8, 2008

Oh, yeah: the reason it's worth using the Linux tools to do this formatting is that the formatter built into XP fails on FAT32 partitions bigger than 32GB, even though the file system itself is good to 8TB.
posted by flabdablet at 6:42 PM on May 8, 2008