How do YOU share a firewire drive?
 

XP Pro can "see" firewire disks, as can OS-X.

If I were to buy a big honking firewire drive, how can I really use it to share files between computers?

It seems to me I'll either have to format it HFS+ or NTFS, and neither O/S is going to play nice with the other.

How does this work?

Mike

Short answer? 50%/50% Apple brand format, Windows brand format.

A universal disk format (I.E. CDFS) is the only one.

As a side note... You have OS X, why on earth would you want Windows, much less XP? :D :p

If you just want to use it to share files and not boot, you could just get one for your Windows box and mount it as a Samba share on your Mac. Mounting an HFS+ volume on Windows would be pretty kludgy to my knowledge.

i would format the external drive as fat32 or NTFS. OS X can read and mount FAT and NTFS volumes, but FAT and NTFS will not mount HFS+ so you would still be able to transfer files to both macs and windows units. i tried doing this about 2 weeks ago and i tried to split the drive 1/2 FAT32 1/2 HFS+ (and i could not get it to work like that) so i just did FAT 32 and our G4 running os 10.2.4 mounts the drive and reads all the files off it.

I don't think OS X can mount an NTFS formatted volume, except one which is shared over a network using some networking file protocol.

If you know a way to directly access NTFS I'd dearly like to hear about it.

i know fat 32 will mount i have done it. NTFS i think will mount, but you have to use a special utility if i can find what it is i will post

Just FYI, since I don't have a stand-alone firewire drive right now, I brought up my old G4 iMac in "target" mode.

I formatted the drive NTFS, which worked fine in XP Pro.

I booted the OS-X install CD, and it wouldn't let me do anything to the drive.

I formatted a 32GB partition FAT32 in XP Pro, THEN booted the OS-X install CD. It doesn't even see the partitions.

:-(

It doesn't appear that OS/X and XP Pro use the same partition table, so now I'm REALLY confused how you can use a single drive between the two -- unless once OS-X is up it can see the partitions...? Disk utilitiy off the OS-X install CD sure can't see them.

Mike

you cannot split a hd between hfs+ and fat or ntfs. but since the mac os will mount pc formatted disks, format the firewire drive in FAT32 and your xp machines and os x machines can both mount the drive. in our tech shop our main download/cdrw machine is running xp i download and burn mac files on it all the time. of course xp cannot read them. i also will copy large amounts of updates, files, etc etc on the fat32 firewire drive and copy them to our macs that way. as far as getting a mac to mount an NTFS partition locally i am not sure of how to do that

It sucks that FAT32 is limited to 32GB partitions.

:-(

I'm still a little confused -- I understand that OS-X will mount FAT32, but it doesn't seem to see the partition table.

So if I have a 60GB drive, and format it with 2x30GB FAT32, how can OS/X "see" it without being able to "see" the partition table?

Maybe it's just the Disk Utility on the OS-X install CD that can't "see" the partition table?

I formatted it 32GB FAT32, and left the rest of the drive unformatted / unallocated, but the OS-X install CD "Disk Utility" just sees it as one big "untitled" partition.

Mike

yeah i ran into that also. i had a 60 gig that i tried to partition 30g FAT32 and 30g HFS+. disk utility will not see the drive as that partition but will see it as one un formatted volume. but if you plug in your firewire drive that is FAT32 os x will mount it and you can read/write files to it. If there is a way to split a drive 1/2 fat32 and 1/2 HFS+ i would love to know, but from what i have tried and researched it seems impossible

Honestly, I was hoping I could split it into 2 FAT32 partitions and install OS-X on a FAT32 partition!

That would get me around the 1/2 and 1/2 issue.

But no joy. The disk utility on the OS-X install disk won't see the FAT32 partitions.

Oh well.

Mike

I just purchased and configured a LaCie d2 250GB external drive. OS X will mount NTFS but only in read-only mode. So therefore, if you want to use the drive with both operating systems, format the partition in FAT32. There is a misconception that one cannot format FAT32 larger than 32 GB. This simply is not true. WINDOWS will not let you format a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB. I formatted my drive on my 15" PB G4 running OS 10.3.8. I hooked up the drive, started up Disk Utility, and found my drive. Then I went to the "erase" tab and I selected MS-DOS as the file system. If you want to partition, do it at this time. After all of that, I had a 233GB FAT32 partition that works great on both Windows XP/2000 and OS X 10.3.8.

Hope this helps!

BUT.

always a but.

there IS a 2gb filesize limit in FAT32. this is an easy ceiling to hit if you plan on storing drive images, video or large graphic files.

still, it is the best option it seems at this point.

The 32GB limit you speak of, is actually a hardware limitation and older IDE controllers. It no longer exists on newer systems and the newer OSes obviously support up to terrabytes of storage space.

I have never ran into a 2gb filesize limit on my FAT32 LaCie 250g Porche drive. I have copied 10gb raw DV files to it with no problems. The only problem I run into is the "Item Icon cannot be copied" which is something with special characters that don't translate to the FAT32 file system.

right. it's 4GB in XP. sorry for the confusion.

That is also an outdated thing that was mentioned. Back when windows 95 first came out things ran on a FAT16 filesystem which was limited to a partition no bigger than 2 gigs. Which is why if you work on an old PC there will be a 8 gig HD in there with 4 x 2gig partitions.

Here goes a link explaining the differences between FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS.

http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/filesystems1.html

that quote speaks to filesize, not partition size.

FYI, i noticed on my earlier link that XP still cant format larger than 32GB during the install process, 'modernness' notwithstanding.

Hmm

I don't know where you get your info from but I have a 150gig HD I installed xp pro (release version) on my system at home. It recognized the full size of the drive during the install.

Also, I was simply pointing out someone who posted the 2gig file size limit probably got confused with FAT16's 2gig file system limit from back in the day, since it was not a file size limit but a file system limit. There is a difference.

Anyways, we can just agree to disagree instead of taking it further :D :cool:

*EDIT*

Oh I see you were talking about FAT32 during the installation process, but then again who would want to run windows on a FAT32 filesystem? Just like who would want to run OS X on a non HFS+ files system (which you can no longer do, has to be HFS+ journaled, or UFS)?

The 32GB limit is in MS's FDISK utility. Using the utilities supplied by the HD manufactures bypasses that limit.

Craig, it doesn't seem to always work but 10.3 is supposed to be able to read most NTFS volumes. There is NO write access whatsoever. I can confirm I've seen this in action with an NTFS-formatted Firewire HD.

Sorry, but that is also incorrect. The limitation was hardware related, specifically coding in the bios. The disks supplied in hard drive boxes are little firmware applets that override the bios, hence they are mostly called EZ bios or something to that effect. They are most annoying and I suggest you never install it. Also, since its a hardware limitation they have jumper settings on the drive to limit the size the 32 gigs. If it were just software limitations they would not need that jumper setting. That is also why you can go buy and IDE controller, and remedy the problem. If it was a software problem an IDE controller would not fix it. The reason the new controller card does fix it, is because the system will use the card's bios and not the motherboard's bios to handle the IDE devices.

here go some links:

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootlist/166.htm#3
http://www.1960pcug.org/~pcnews/2002...isk_limits.htm
http://www.makeitsimple.com/sections...rtid=10&page=2


FAT 32 partitions support terrabytes in size:

http://support.microsoft.com/support.../Q154/9/97.ASP

win2k only supports 32gig limit, but win2k was when MS first merged NTFS and FAT32 into one OS, before it was either win98 or winnt. Now, with windows xp, its all just NTFS.

Furthermore, in addition to the BIOS limitations, the IDE controllers themselves had limitations of a 137GB, until recently with the newest revisions of EIDE controllers out there.

Now, if you go buy/build a brand new computer you should not experience any of these limitations. Since most of the limitations were due to older hardware, older bios versions and older firmware, and older versions of the OSes.