I tried some experiments with my Maxtor drive and it looks like one of them might have worked. I tried reformatting the drive and this ended up with me recreating the partition too. I got a response from MediaFour, with a link to a System Report utility; I ran the executable and was shocked to see my Maxtor drive was now showing up. MacDrive was recognizing it. I hadn’t even rebooted XP from the night before, so the only change was my having erased and reformatting the hard drive.So it looks like everything is running great. The FireWire is also fast enough that I can play files right off the external hard drive, making it even more useful than for just archiving.
I feel much better now.
True, those HDTV files are still too much for my laptop to handle, plus there’s the fact a lot of my biggest files are SHN and FLAC and APE which OS X can’t handle anyway. Because of this I gave some thought to re-re-reformatting my external Maxtor drive to FAT32 and making it primarily a Windows drive (to sit alongside my desktop computer). But FAT32 has too many limitations regarding partition and file sizes. It seems easier to leave it as Mac drive, readable by MacDrive, as planned.
