Apple external Mac HDD with files on PC

Hi all. I am in urgent need of some help here. I have 2 Lacie external HDDs of a friend's here with a ton of video footage on them. I use a PC and she uses the drives on a Macbook Pro. I will be editing the footage on my PC but I cannot read the files stored on the drives. I figured that with Mac and PCs becoming much more alike, that each OS would be able to view each others files.

How can I possibly get access to the files other than networking the laptop to my PC and transferring the files over to mine? At the moment I don't have enough space free to transfer the footage over, and she need her laptop in the mean time. I was hoping to edit directly from these external drives. Am I completely out of luck?

Help is greatly appreciated!

 

You're pretty much out of luck. The Mac drives are formatted with the MacOS Extended filesystem, and all PC's can read is NTFS and FAT(32). Another problem would arise with the video formats, as video editing on a Mac is different, as Macs use Quicktime to store video, and PC's tend to use Windows Media. (They can be easily converted though.)

 

Not being able to accept defeat, I found a program called Macdrive. It allows a pc to use a a Mac formatted drive as it's own. The only problem I have encountered with it is that some files have no extensions, but that must be because of the way OS X stores it's metadata for certain files. The program is pretty slick as it runs embedded in windows and shows Mac drives right in explorer, and also allows any pc software to access the files.

Apparently it works really well for people using bootcamp on their Macs, as it allows access to the Mac partition while using XP.

I'd recommend the program to anyone facing a similar problem to the one I faced.

 

You can read and write HFS partitions in windows using macdrive.
You can read and write to NTFS partitions in osx using NTFS3g.

The mac external hdd your talking about is probably HFS. Macdrive should solve your problem.

Edit: Sorry, didn't see that you found it.
Leaving this here though, might be usefull to some people.

 

No prob, thanks anyways!

I have no idea why this hasn't been integrated into either OS, as it clearly increases the functionality of both.