[Felix]

Does anyone have experience with using a external FW-Drive or a partition thereof formatted to FAT32 (DOS)?

Are there any problems one might encounter or has to be aware of?

I want to buy one and I wonder whether I should get a combo (FW+USB) drive to have the possiblity to plug in Windows Notebooks.

[bradoesch]

You Mac can read/use a FAT32 formatted drive, but it'll work best as HFS or HFS + formatted.
Here's an idea:
Say the drive is 40GB;
Partition the drive so you've got a 35GB partion, HFS +.
Your second partition will be around 1GB (since a 40GB drive isn't actually 40GB of usuable space), and format that partion as FAT16 (I believe that's what the Mac OS will format DOS drives as, I could be wrong, though. Remember, FAT32 can only be read by later version of Windows 95 and later).
OK, then if you want to share files with a Windows computer, copy the files to the 1GB FATxx partion, and go from there.
Of course, changing the sizes of those partitions to your liking, since I have no idea what size/quanity of files you're gonna be transferring.

Brad

[Mithras]

Does anyone know if this partitioning scheme actually works?

I want to get a Firewire/USB2 combo drive. Ideally I'd make a big HFS+ partition, and a smaller FAT16 partition to use for swapping files between Mac and PC.

However, I have a mild suspicion that a PC won't be able to read the Mac-created partition map. I'd love to be told otherwise.

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by Mithras:
Does anyone know if this partitioning scheme actually works?

I want to get a Firewire/USB2 combo drive. Ideally I'd make a big HFS+ partition, and a smaller FAT16 partition to use for swapping files between Mac and PC.

However, I have a mild suspicion that a PC won't be able to read the Mac-created partition map. I'd love to be told otherwise.

OK, I'll tell you otherwise: A PC can read a Mac created DOS disk.
Was that what you wanted to hear?

Think about a Mac formatting a floppy disk in a DOS format. Does it work with a PC? Yes. I've never formatted a hard disk as FATxx and tried it on a PC, but I'm 99% sure there won't be any problems.


Brad

[Mithras]

Thanks for the input.

I have indeed formatted an entire drive as FAT and used it with a PC.

What I wonder is whether one can format a drive as two partitions - half HFS+, and half FAT - with the PC properly finding the FAT part and not getting upset about the HFS+ part.

Any ideas?