advice on moving a PC IDE drive to a G4 panther

[surfmonkee]

I am about to put a G4 online as my main internet machine.
It has a 10Gb drive which holds the OS. panther 10.3.4

I dont want to write any other stuff to this drive other than OS related stuff.

I intend to put the 20GB IDE drive from my XP machine in to the G4 to write everything else to that, plus a firewire drive for downloaded avi files.

the IDE drive from the xp machine and the firewire drive are both formatted to NTFS. I can move the data off both discs temporarily, mainly downloaded avi files.

From what I read here I need to reformat the drives to FAT for the mac to see them.

can I put the empty reformatted drives (fat) in to the mac IDE and firewire and have the mac re format them to a format the mac would prefer? I mainly download 700Mb - 1.3Gb avi files.

any advice would be most welcome on this subject and as a G4 mac machine, its time to say goodbye to spybot avg and zonealarm, so any advice on anti virus and firewalls for the G4 would also be helpful. I will be on a 7.6 mbps dsl internet connection.

xx

[krazykrl]

If you have a place to temporarily store all of the files on your FireWire drive and your 20GB drive I would recommend formatting the drives you will be using on the Mac as HFS Plus (+). As long as you do not need to use these drives on Windows ever again. The files can be read on both systems, say if you were view them from a share, but you would no longer be able to plug the firewire disk into a PC and read it, same with the IDE drive. But, it would be faster as HFS+ and you would not be losing capacity like you would formatting as FAT (or DOS as it is considered on the Mac). However if you think you will find the need to plug the drives into a PC again and have them be read, then use FAT.

I can't help you with a firewall, I don't use one on my Mac. Hopefully someone else here can help.

[surfmonkee]

KrazyKRL, thank you for that most helpful information.

I shall do exactly as you say, I wont need to plug the drive in to a pc again, If I need to move a file or two to a windows machine I can do that with a usb stick.

many thanks
xx