Sharing Data with a Mac


Presumably, you've gone through all this trouble of getting your Mac to act like a Windows machine because there's some piece of Windows software that you need to use to generate some kind of data that you can't generate on your Mac. This means that at some point, you'll need to move data back and forth between your Boot Campenabled Mac and a Mac OS X Mac, or even between the Windows and Mac partitions of your Boot Camp machine.

There are many ways that you can share data between your new Windows Mac and its better half or with another Mac on your local area network.

Configuring your Mac to serve

Before you can connect a Windows XP machine to a Mac, you have to configure the Mac as a file server. Follow these steps:

1.

In System Preferences, click Sharing.

2.

Check the Windows Sharing checkbox.

3.

If you have multiple accounts on your Mac, you'll need to indicate which accounts you want to share.

Click the Accounts button, and in the resulting dialog box, check the box for each account that you want to make available to the Windows network.

Connecting Windows XP to a Mac

With your Mac configured to serve, you're ready to connect your Windows machine to it, just as you can network between Macs running Mac OS X. Follow these steps:

1.

In Windows XP, choose Start > My Computer.

2.

Click My Network Places.

The My Network Places window opens.

3.

Click "View workgroup computers."

You should see all the machines on your local area network that are set up to serve for Windows.

4.

Double-click the computer you want to connect to.

5.

Enter your user name and password.

You will see a bunch of icons representing all the different connections that go into the server to which you are connecting. Many of these will be printer connections, but there should be one that has the same name as the server.

6.

Double-click the server icon.

You should see your Home folder, just as it appears on your Mac.

Connecting to Mac drives and the Mac partition

The bulk of your data will be tied up on the Mac partition of your Mac, and you might also have data on external drives of some kind. Fortunately, a company called Mediafour makes an excellent Windows product called MacDrive, which lets you read Mac-formatted drives from Windows.

You can download a demo version of the $59.95 MacDrive from www.mediafour.com/products. Double-click the installer and then follow the onscreen instructions to install.

After restarting, MacDrive will present the Getting Started with MacDrive screen.

Click View Mac disks in My Computer. A My Computer window will open, and you should see, in addition to the C drive that Windows is installed on, a new F drive with the same name as your Mac partition. The icon should have a little apple next to it. This is the other partition on your computer, the one that contains your Mac files, and you can open it up and browse to any location.

You can get in to any User folder on your Mac partition, so if you're running multiple users on the Mac side, there will be nothing to prevent a Windows user from gaining access to all the data in any account on your Mac partition.

You can also write files to this drive freely, just as you would to your normal Windows drive. This means you can copy files to your Mac partition or save them directly to your Mac partition. When you next boot into Mac OS X, you'll have access to those new, Windows-generated files.

MacDrive also works with external FireWire drives.

Using Dual-Format CDs with MacDrive

Some application CDs, especially game CDs, include both Mac and Windows partitions. By default, MacDrive shows these discs as Mac discs, meaning that you can't run the Windows installers that are included on the Windows partition of the disc.

To view the Windows partition of a CD or DVD when using MacDrive, follow these steps:

1.

Choose Start > All Programs > MacDrive 6 > Get Started With MacDrive 6.

2.

In the resulting dialog box, click Change Mac Drive Options.

The MacDrive Properties window opens.

3.

Click the Options tab.

4.

Select Show Windows Files, and click OK.

Dual-format CDs should show up as normal Windows discs.





Apple Boot Camp Public Beta First Look
Apple Boot Camp Public Beta First Look
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 16

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