Anyone have trouble using external drive with mac and pc?

A band mate of mine uses a mac and has some files that we tried to put on my external drive. The mac could read but not write to my external drive I use with my pc and my pc could find his external drive in device manager but not in my computer. In disc management on my pc it says his drive has a GPT Protective Partition on it. Any ideas on how to transfer these files? Thanks!

Mac and Windows use different file systems for their hard drives. For all relatively recent Macs, it's called HFS+; for all relatively recent Windows machines, it's NTFS. OS X can read NTFS but not write to it (someone correct me if I'm wrong here--maybe there is a way to write with some additional software?). XP and Vista can neither read nor write HFS+, unless you use some sort of third-party software to do so--I think there's something called "MacDrive" or something like that for this purpose. Both OS's can read and write to FAT32, which is yet another file system. Unfortunately, FAT32 has other shortcomings for many uses. However, if you get a USB stick, you can format it to FAT32 and transfer files back and forth with glee. Of course, it depends on how much data you plan on sharing. Other options: : Format a bigger external drive to FAT 32, or partition one of your current external drives to have a FAT32 partition. : Network the computers, if you're able to get them in the same room together (several variations here). : Use some sort of online storage for exchanging files. : CD-Rs or DVD-Rs, thought at this point I would go back to the USB stick, which can be had in pretty large capacities these days. -Tom

Thanks for the reply. After considering my ptions I opted to jut burn the files to multiple DVD-Rs. Maybe one day Macs and PCs will get along, not holding my breath though.

I have a couple of firewire drives formatted to fat32 just for the purpose of moving files from mac > windows and vice-versa. Works fine unless you have a file that is over 2 gigs which as I understand it, is the limit for fat32.

for pc's theres a program called macdrive that will let you read and write mac hd's. i'm not sure if theres something for macs that will do the same.

found some mac software to read ntfs drives;

Have been using MacFuse and Ntfs-3g for quite a while. The earlier versions weren't the most stable, but works very nicely now. I do recommend them. I haven't had to think about filesystems for a while because of them.