For anyone else out there working to move off Win to the Mac, here’s a tip…

If you intend to use an external drive to share between the machines, or to facilitate your transition, consider formatting it as FAT32. MacOS X will read from an NTFS volume, but is unable to write to NTFS. Sounds simple, right? Just connect the external drive to the PC, and use the Storage Manager to format and move away…

Not so fast there, Junior. XP has a limitation as to the maximum size FAT32 partition it can create. While FAT32 partitions can (at least theoretically) be as large as 2 terabytes, the Win2K and later (at least through XPSP2) can only format up to a 32 gigabyte partition. Which is a pain when you have about 120 gigs to move around, and have a 250 gig drive (9 partitions, anyone? I don’t think so). Why? Because monster FAT32 partitions don’t perform as well as monster NTFS partitions, that’s why. Makes sense…

What to do? Well, you could format an NTFS partition and then deal with it being read-only on the Mac. Or, you could look around the Web and find the ever-cool “SwissKnife v3” drive manager from CompuApps. SwissKnife, found at CNET’s Download.Com site, took longer to download than it did to create the requisite 248 gig partition. I moved a few files to the drive, connected it to my loaner PowerBook, and then dragged a couple of files to it and guess what - IT WORKED!