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External HD - how best to format?
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Apr 2007
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Hi ,
I'm wondering how to best format a WD My Book Studio 750gb? It's already formatted as HFS+. I've a MBP running XP on Bootcamp, which I mostly use, and OSX Tiger which I use infrequently. The external HD will be used as backup just by me, mostly large-ish files, not many small docs.
Easiest i suppose would be FAT32 using some third party app, although i've read that its performance is rubbish on partitions over 32gb. I don't want to use NTFS because if the Bootcamp partition goes tits up I won't be able to read the hd from OSX, I understand. I've just read about the Linux Ext2 format which OSX and XP could both read but I don't know too much about it, I've never done anything with Linux before.
Does anybody have any decent suggestions please? I'm just confused at the moment 
Out of interest, is it possible to repartition the disk keeping some HFS+ and making the rest FAT32?
Would Partition Magic work from XP on it?
thanks in advance,
smithy.
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Moderator  Join Date: Oct 2001
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Celebrating 10 years and 4000 posts on MacNN!
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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Originally Posted by smithy 
Easiest i suppose would be FAT32 using some third party app, although i've read that its performance is rubbish on partitions over 32gb. I don't want to use NTFS because if the Bootcamp partition goes tits up I won't be able to read the hd from OSX, I understand.
NTFS is the way to go. OSX can read it natively (out of the box), and write to it with free software.
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Thanks ibook_steve and mduell,
ibook_steve - as I only use OSx fairly infrequently I don't really want to spend extra £££ on it, but it's good to know of that.
mduell - that's great! i didn't know you could write to NTFS with OSX - what's the software called? (I'll google it in the meantime...)
cheers,
smithy.
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Administrator  Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
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One title that will let OS X write to an NTFS partition is called "MacFuse". There are others that Google will help you find.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
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Thanks ghporter, I saw that one come up a lot in Google and was going to ask if that was the one.
best,
smithy.
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