Help my mac and pc files get along!

September 5, 2008 6:04 PM

mac files show up on pc but can't use - won't show up at all on mac. What to do?

So, yesterday I gave a pc formatted thumb drive to a client and he copied a bunch of files from his mac for me to use. Got home - opened up my drive, saw them all, no problem. But then when I came time to use them - problem. The files have all kinds of names that look like they're some of index - not photoshop files like I should have.

Again, I think - np. I'll take my drive down to my neighbor's mac and open them up from there. Except I CAN'T SEE THE FILES AT ALL ON THE MAC!!!! All my pc files are all there - pretty as a picture - but the mac files are nowhere to be seen and I don't know how to view hidden files or anything like that on a mac.

So can anyone offer any advice? I have access to a mac and a pc, but they are not networked together.

posted by katyjack to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Open a terminal on the mac and type:
ls -a /Volumes/[thumbdrive]/

where [thumbdrive] is the name of the drive (typically something like USB Disk. N.B.: if the drive name has a space in it, you'll need to escape it by prepending a backslash, e.g. USB\ Disk.

Are the names of the mac files listed?
posted by mr_roboto at 6:34 PM on September 5, 2008

Response by poster: I am mac illiterate and my mac owning neighbor is even more so. How do I open a terminal?
posted by katyjack at 6:41 PM on September 5, 2008

Response by poster: Oh - and thanks for responding.
posted by katyjack at 6:42 PM on September 5, 2008

Just jumping in to help...you open a Terminal in Mac by going to Finder - Applications - Utilities - Terminal
posted by forthright at 6:49 PM on September 5, 2008

Response by poster: A piece of information that might be a clue - once I got the thumb drive back I had two folders on it .spotlight-v100 and .Trashes. My google searching shows that .spotlight-v100 has some purpose, but I've yet to figure out what that purpose might be.
posted by katyjack at 6:57 PM on September 5, 2008

.spotlight-v100 is Spotlight's index of files on the drive. Spotlight is Apple's systemwide search.
posted by nathan_teske at 7:05 PM on September 5, 2008

Response by poster: So if that's all I see does that mean that the files I _should_ have aren't on the thumb drive or that they're there and I can't see them.
posted by katyjack at 7:08 PM on September 5, 2008

Can we get some sample filenames?
posted by nathan_teske at 7:17 PM on September 5, 2008

Response by poster: 0.indexGroups, 0.indexPostings, indexState, psid.db and several others. Is there something specific I should be looking for?
posted by katyjack at 7:30 PM on September 5, 2008

OS X adds a whole bunch of extra, hidden files when saving to non-HFS filesystems, such as the one on the thumb drive. These generally start with a dot. However, the files that you need should be there with the standard, Windows-like filename.

Judging by the fact that your neighbor's Mac doesn't show these files, and you can't find them on Windows, I would assume that they simply aren't there. Maybe the copy process failed?
posted by wsp at 10:12 PM on September 5, 2008

An added note: the extra files are typically named something like ._filename.ext, and one exists for every file OS X has edited or created. They contain some extra data OS X uses.
posted by wsp at 10:17 PM on September 5, 2008