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 serveBefore you can connect a Windows XP machine to a Mac, you have to configure the Mac as a file server. Follow these steps:
Connecting Windows XP to a MacWith 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:
Connecting to Mac drives and the Mac partitionThe 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.
|