[ggirton]

So, who formatS first mac or windows?
Or does it even matter?

When I put my Firewire drive in and partition it I only have
4 options: unused (not 4 me), classic MacoSX, Extended OSX,
and Unix File System (the famous UFS).

If I pick any one of these last three, will Windows
read it?

Or if I format the firewire drive on Windows first will
the MacOSX read it?

thanks!

[v8q]

Originally posted by ggirton:
<STRONG>So, who formatS first mac or windows?
Or does it even matter?

When I put my Firewire drive in and partition it I only have
4 options: unused (not 4 me), classic MacoSX, Extended OSX,
and Unix File System (the famous UFS).

If I pick any one of these last three, will Windows
read it?

Or if I format the firewire drive on Windows first will
the MacOSX read it?

thanks!</STRONG>

If I understand your question, this is no different than putting a disk directly on your IDE cable, formating it and then expecting it to work in a different computer/OS. The only way for that to work - regargless of the interface is to choose a format/filesystem that both can understand.

Since windows is not smart enough to read a mac disk, you would probably have the best luck formating as DOS/FAT since apple can recognize that, but if the disk is very big you will waste a lot of space.

[ggirton]

Originally posted by v8q:
<STRONG>
Since windows is not smart enough to read a mac disk, you would probably have the best luck formating as DOS/FAT since apple can recognize that, but if the disk is very big you will waste a lot of space.</STRONG>

Thanks, that is just what I was looking for! It seems like my Mac will probably recognize the FAT filesystem, which I think is limited to only 2G of space.

Since I have a 20G drive, I would have to create 10 DOS partitions to make full use of it -- and I have no idea if the Mac would read all 10 partitions in OS X. Still, there is a way to find out.

I have read up on this a little bit since, and windows 2000 does have a couple more formats it can read. There is CDFS, the CD file system, and there is UDF, the Universal Disk Format. That's the one used for DVDs', and Windows2000 can only read that, not write it. Since my main use is to bring things over from Win2K to the Mac, that probably isn't the one.

I also explored the Unix services for Win2K, because Unix file system is one of the Mac options. However, this additional-cost service (about 160 bucks US) seems designed only to read disks which are on other unix computers attached over the network. Not to read a disk on the same computer which is formatted in some other way.


Anyway, thanks for the response, it definitely gives me something to go on. It sounds like Windows has to format first.

cheers!

[lavar78]

MacOS X can read Fat32 - that's the format you should use.

[RAzaRazor]

Fat32 would be your best option.
Macs have no problem reading and writing these disks.

NTFS is the only better option, but that requires Windows NT, and I don't know if a Mac can read that format.