j,

Though I haven't personally used it, SharePoints is probably going to allow you to setup sharing as you've described. From what I understand it works kinda like Apple's "old" file sharing (i.e. Users and Groups) interface-wise, but instead actually manipulates the SMB (Windows) file sharing built-in to Mac OS X instead.

I hope this does the trick for you!

Joel

A quick note to bring to your attention that I'm now hosting my own web site again. As mentioned on my home page, that means quicker, more reliable response and page loading times, as well as the return of my own forums (which, by the way, are certainly not meant to compete with this forum, but rather to compliment it, along with Apple's support discussions).

Feel free to drop by and check things out!

Thanks,

Joel

This is something I should probably know but can't quite figure out. I've managed to set up a network between an iBook (OS 10.3) and a PC (WinXP). However, the PC is able to access the entire hard drive of the iBook. This makes navigating through the files very slow and also makes the files vulnerable to accidently deletion. Is there a way to limit the files or folders accessible on the mac? Thanks to anyone who knows the answer!

Funny you describe this issue as a "problem" when most others have an issue of only being able to see their "Home" folder on their Mac, where they would rather be able to see all their Mac's hard drive.

Though I'm not sure exactly how - by default - you have been able to access all of your Mac's hard drive when connecting to it from a PC (even if you're using an administrator login on your Mac), perhaps the program that I normally point out to everyone else (that allows you to control how much of your Mac you "see" when connecting via Windows file sharing) will instead give you the ability to restrict access to your Mac, thus speeding things along (hopefully, assuming full access to your Mac is actually the cause of the slowdown).

That program is called SharePoints and it can be downloaded from here. Please post back and let it be known whether or not this helped you solve things. Good luck!

Joel

This is really useful. I'm fairly new to Mac and have an iMac OSX, the problem I have is trying to sync MS Outlook on a laptop running XP (it has firewire, bluetooth etc for connection to MAC) with iCal and Address Book, can you help point me in the right direction please?

Many thanks.

JoniMac,

I've yet to delve into using iCal or Address Book as you're attempting to and seriously doubt that I personally can help you get things working.

However, you may want to try visiting (if you haven't already) the following sites to see if others can assist you:

Apple's iCal Discussions
-and-
Apple Support Discussions (I believe there is an Address Book-specific area, too, but the site was very slowly as I was trying to access it)
-or-
MacFixit Forums: Applications Mac OS X

Sorry I can't be of more help, but I wish you the best of luck in finding a solution to the problems you're having.

Joel

Thanks Joel, I'll give them a try.

Thanks Joel for the excellent articles on file sharing between OSX and Windows. I have been trying for weeks to connect to my wife's PC using OSX help and other tutorials at other websites. Reading your article solved the problem in one fell swoop!!!

Keep up the great work! Apple should use your articles instead of their pretty non-informative articles.

Frank Cicchetto

Hello and Happy Holidays!

I am looking for a way to mount an external HFS+ Mac
hard drive on my PC with Windows 2000 Pro.

The external 80GB hard drive works fine on my Mac.
The drive case has both a USB and a FireWire port.
I purchased the drive to backup large files from my
Mac. Now, I need to swap large files between Mac
and PC, and make backups of very large folders using
the DVD writer on my PC.

I can connect my HFS+ formatted external drive to my
Mac (with MacOS 9.2.2) via any FireWire port, and it
mounts, and I can read and write folders and files.

I can connect my external drive to my PC (with
Windows 2000) via any USB port, and the drive lights
up, but will NOT mount. My external 512MB USB FLASH
DRIVE works OK, and I can transfer files between MAC
and PC that way, but not larger files.

I found this on the internet:

Solutions: Sharing Disks Between Macs and PCs

Windows users can add software that enables the PC
to recognize Mac disks and HFS drives.

http://www.macwindows.com/disks2.html

Which lead me here:

HFVExplorer web page

http://gamma.nic.fi/~lpesonen/HFVExplorer/

I was able to download and run HFVExplorer 1.3.1 on
Windows 2000, and it shows my two internal hard
drives... but the external drive still will not
mount. It seems invisible. The drive lite comes on
when I plug in the USB cable, but nothing more.

Can you offer any advice?

Am I missing something?

Thanks.

- Geo

Frank: You're very welcome! Thanks for your kind words and for taking the time post and let me know that you've gotten file sharing working. I hope that it continues to work well for you!

Geo:

Unfortunately I don't have much more to offer than the MacWindows.com page you linked to. If the free HFVExplorer doesn't work for you, you may have to (after having tried and tested a demo/trial download) spend money on one of the other HFS-related utilities listed, such as MacDisk (I've not personally used any of these software packages, by the way).

You could try and change for formatting of your external drive to something else (such as FAT32, which both Windows 2000 and Mac OS X recognize; I assume this is how your USB flash drive is formatted, as is the one I have), but performance reading from and writing to the external drive may be a bit lacking. Plus, you would have to format the drive as FAT32 using a different OS (see this Microsoft support article). To my knowledge NTFS still isn't an option since last I heard Mac OS X can only read NTFS volumes, not write to them (see quote from an Apple KBase article below):

"Mac OS X 10.3 Panther works with local NTFS-formatted volumes. The volume will be read-only.

"Warning: NTFS formatted drives cannot be used in a Macintosh (except as read-only with Mac OS X 10.,3 as noted above). If you attempt to use a NTFS formatted disk, upon starting up the Mac OS will prompt you to format the drive. Do not format the drive, doing so will erase the contents of the drive. If you have an NTFS formatted disk, you must use another method to transfer the data from the PC to the Macintosh."

About the only other thing I can suggest is to post a separate message within this forum (or on Apple's support discussions to see if you can get feedback from others who have actually personally, hands-on dealt with the situation you're working with and see how they have things setup.

Good luck finding what I hope is an inexpensive and reliable solution!

Joel