Time past so fast and yet still in CNY holiday mood :P even now almost reach month end of February.
Just before the holiday, some friends came and asked wonder their iPod can be an external Hard Drive for storage beside in use with just iTunes for music and video and I told them YES, in fact it was design to do so.
But a good question follow, whereby how I configure my iPod (iPod Classic 160GB) to sync with iTunes from Mac and also work as an external Hard Drive in both PC and Mac environments. (where I though not many end user would want it to be this way beside some technical person like us)
From the manual, most of us plug in the iPod for the very first time either in PC or Mac then configure it using iTunes, name the drive and also click on the box next to "enable disk use" to make the iPod as an external Hard Drive. But this only allowed the iPod to work with one environment.
Here are some experiences and steps I would like to share how I did it. Firstly by knowing there are deference formats for a drive between Apple in Mac OS extended where PC (XP/Vista) are either FAT or NTFS is very important because is the format that reason our iPod can only work under one environment but not two.
Mac OS can read and write in all Mac OS extended, FAT but only read NTFS format where-else XP or even newly Vista can't recognize Mac OS extended. A little bit of computer terms here where NTFS recognize FAT but not another round for FAT to read NTFS system.
It looks like this: Mac > NTFS > FAT
I exit iTunes then I runs Disk Utility where you can find it under Application\Utilities and erase (you may want to know in PC base we call it FORMAT) the iPod I name by choosing "MS-DOS File System" in the Volume Format selection and also give a name to it.
BUT unfortunately I found my iPod did not work out correctly after working within XP and Mac for a week later. So I follow the formula above, I configure it another way round.
I reset (you can download this tools here) my iPod using iTunes in XP and re-do the step by step as same as iTunes under Mac. When finished I exit iTunes then look into My Computer and right click on my iPod drive then chose "format" by choosing FAT but not NTFS. Then only I went back to Mac iTunes to sync my musics and video.
In Mac iTunes, it gave a warning saying that my iPod was sync with another iTunes, do I want to erase those previous sync and switch to it, I choose yes.
I believe it is confusing and weird but don't ask me why ya, it just work and I've been using my iPod between two environment and sync it with iTunes from Mac for the past 4 months now :o
