As the proud owner of a fourth generation iPod for a little over a week now, I am finding my white and silver precious to be a tremendously useful little device. Aside from its obvious function as a portable music player, a function that it executes admirably, it serves as a handy rudimentary organizer (calendar and contacts) and is great for shuttling large files between work and home and across platforms.
Just this past week, we had a customer who needed to move some large video files on a USB-only Windows laptop to a Firewire-enabled Mac. Using the iPod and both dock connector cables (USB-2 and Firewire), this wasn’t a problem.
My iPod was initially formatted for Macintosh (HFS+), but Windows can’t read HFS-formatted volumes. So before transferring over my music library, I plugged the iPod into a Windows system, ran the setup software on the install CD, and reformatted the drive for Windows.
While most features on a Windows-formatted iPod work flawlessly on both Windows and Mac OS systems, there are a few small drawbacks to formatting an iPod for Windows. This is because the iPod software, by default, chooses to format the iPod’s hard drive as FAT 32.
The most significant limitation of FAT 32 is its 4 GB file size limit. Especially since raw video files tend to be rather unwieldy; just 10 minutes of video in DV-NTSC format takes up around 4 GB.
Also, folders cannot have Mac OS custom icons on a FAT 32 volume. Interestingly enough, the iPod’s main volume (when disk use is enabled) can have a custom icon; however, that icon must be reapplied on each new Mac that the iPod is plugged into.
Copying files over from the Mac occasionally brings up a “cannot copy files with certain characters in their names” error dialog; one then has to archive such files as a Zip or Stuffit file before copying. Archiving any application package files is a good idea before copying over.
Not content to let well enough alone, though, I attempted to convert my iPod’s primary partition to NTFS. I first tried Partition Magic, which does not even seem to be able to see external Firewire drives. My next option was to use XP’s built-in Disk Manager in the Computer Management utility. This, as expected, required wiping all data, including my settings and music files, but the files were easily resynched.
The NTFS-formatted iPod worked perfectly on the Windows system, but the showstopper was when I brought the iPod back over to my Macintosh. Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) only has read access for NTFS volumes. Version 10.3.5 was supposed to enhance NTFS write support in a limited fashion, but my iPod mounted on the Mac as read-only. Hopefully, this will change in a future version of the Mac OS, but for now I had to go back to FAT 32.
In the future, you can use the standard NT/XP utility CONVERT. (Just type “convert /?” on the command line to get the format.
It converts FAT/FAT32 drives to NTFS, without losing data. It only goes one direction (FAT32-> NTFS, not the otherway). Since it doesn’t move data (it just builds a NTFS directory structure, its quite fast. However it also leaves the drive with a lot of free space fragmentation (since the fragment size on NFTS is much smaller than FAT32, you all the sudden get lots of new “free fragments”.). I recommend using the commercial version of Diskeeper on the drive after convert, to help reduce the free space fragmentation.
I really should familiarize myself with all of the NT/XP command line directives. CONVERT is something to definitely keep in mind for other volumes I may need to change to NTFS.
Too bad NTFS is still not yet an option for my iPod. Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) can read, but can’t write to NTFS volumes; I have doubts that 10.5 will be able to write to NTFS either. At least Macs can still read NTFS across a network via Samba.
There are some programs that support HFS+ and/or iPods on windows directly:
http://www.mediafour.com/
XPlay is iPod only, MacDrive will also allow using things like external firewire disks. This is not good if you use your iPod across different windows machines, but if you simply go between Mac and one windows system, you can use the iPod with HFS+ (and without the FAT limitations).
The 4gb file size limit is a problem for me as well. Am more concerned about the 4gb limit than xOs. It’s been a year… has the landscape changed? Is ntfs really stable (if i can live with mac limitations)?
tz, I finally had a chance to take a a look at XPlay. That’s cool that they repurposed technology from their MacDrive product to enable reading of HFS-formatted iPods on Windows, and it has much of the functionality that the program PodWorks has on the Mac.
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Dhominator, the file size limit is a pain sometimes. Read functionality on the Mac is key for me, though, so I haven’t had too much experience with NTFS-formatted iPods since my initial test. I imagine the stability would be similar to any other NTFS-formatted volume, which is pretty good.
Be careful when trying these procedures. I used XP’s disk management to format my 5th gen iPod ‘with video’ and made it unusable. iTunes ran fine and updated the content, but the iPod could not see any content. I had to download and run the iPodSetup program (from Apple support) to restore it to the factory setup. I guess I will try Convert after iTunes finishes updating.
Convert also does not work on new iPods. I ran “Convert d: /FS:NTFS”, which seemed to work fine. I even ran the Windows defragmenter, which found only minor fragmentation. iTunes 6.0.1.3 shows that the iPod is updated with all my songs, playlists, photos and videos, but the iPod itself acts like it has just been turned on for the first time. Each power-up prompts for a language choice and there is no content visible on in. No songs, playlists, photos or videos. I have succesfully restored to factory setup again.
Thanks for the word of warning, Chris. A 5th gen iPod? I’m jealous. I like the looks of those even more than the nano.
What s funny is that I can’t find any info about this on any review sites. of course Apple’s idea of “Specifications” is very limited. They only claim that it will “Store Files”, no info about disk format or file size limitations. I would really like to be able to use this iPod for disk backups, but I guess I’ll have to keep files less than 4 G for now.
Great, I have a 4th Gen iPod and I just found out it was fat32 after a size error :( Switched it to NTFS and it works great.
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I can’t get mine to format NTFS. Keep getting an error. Anyone have any information on how they did this? I tried going to Disk Management but it’s not working. Any help would be great. thanks
I’ve been playing around with my third gen iPod for over two years now, and have had my ups and downs. It has always had a problem where something will get corrupted (without fail, whenever I try to back up the iPod onto my computer at least five files will fail to read), or the OS will fail on it, or something else will happen which forces me to restore it.
I keep thinking that maybe it’s a problem with it being FAT32. But when I try to use the CONVERT command on it in Disk Mode, the iPod will no longer boot. It’ll just sit at the apple screen unless I put it back into Disk Mode. I’ll have to try Disk Manager to see if it makes a difference, but I don’t think it will. The permissions, by the way, were already set (by me) to be Everyone/Full Access…
I’d love to have an iPod with a more reliable hard disk. I don’t mind the battery life being short like it is, but it’s having to restore it all the time and losing songs each time I do that makes me angry.
So for you people with NTFS iPods, how the heck did you get that to work?