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dwishbone · Jan 15, 2003, 12:32 PM

i just purchased an external Firewire 120GB 7200 HD I plan to share between my PC and my Powerbook 17" (once it finally arrives). I was wondering what the best way to format it would be.

Windows XP only supports NTFS and FAT32.
MacOS X supports FAT32, but the problem is i'd have to split this sucker into 4 partitions. FAT32 has a partition size limit of 32GB I believe. That would suck.
I would say HFS+ or UFS, but XP doesn't support those. I would say NTFS, but to my knowledge Jaguar doesn't support NTFS.
it seems the only file system in common is FAT32.

does anyone have any suggestions? are the 4 FAT32 partitions the only way to go? i know there are third party solutions for this, but i don't want to spend anymore money that i have to.

jgrn307 · Mar 12, 2003, 02:50 PM

Hey, I saw your post -- in actuality, the upper limit of FAT32 is 2 TB, not 32 GB. There's some stupidness with MS XP that they only allow up to 32 GB formatting, but there are a LOT of shareware programs that'll allow you to format the entire drive as FAT32 (go to www.downloads.com and search for FAT32 -- I'm runnign Paragon Partition Manager right now, seems to be working fine).

One thing to remember, Macs can't read over 128GB fat32 partitions, currently, so if you have a larger drive you still need to break it up!

Terri · Mar 12, 2003, 03:08 PM

I always worry when I format a drive as DOS, that is what Disk Utility calls it, and what will happen if they have drive problems.

I guess you can fix drive problems while it is connected to a PC, but as far as I know there is nothing on the Mac side that can fix a DOS partition

I just did this to a 80 gig FireWire/USB2 drive, one partition, for a friend that was going to visit her boyfriend who only has a PC. I haven't heard back so I guess all went well for her and using the drive with her boyfriend's PC.

jgrn307 · Mar 12, 2003, 03:13 PM

Yeah, it can defintely be an issue, but if you are going to be using it cross platform, as long as you have the tools SOMEPLACE I think its fine. Otherwise, what was the point of formatting it for cross-platform?

A minor question: is there anything inherently bad about using an FAT32 drive on a Mac -- e.g. speed issues, security, etc... Or is it just a proprietary issue, where one is not better than the other, just different?

Terri · Mar 12, 2003, 03:32 PM

I think it is slower on a Mac when it is PC formatted then if it is formatted HFS+, at least that is just what it feels like to me. I get zip disks all the time PC formatted and most of the time the designers don't even realize it.