few questions...
 

I'm getting my 2nd mac soon a lovely little 12.1" ibook, and I'm also buying some goodies to go with it..

basically I'm getting myself a airport card and I was wondering if it does work 100% with my current d-link wireless stuff.

Also I'm wanting to get myself a external caddy thingy so I can put a DVD\CD-RW combo drive in there probably the latest liteon 48x cd-rw and 16x dvd one, will that work?

As well as that... I'd like to get myself a 120gb HD to go with that as well, they will be connecting through firewire.. what would be the best filesystem to format the drive with? fat32?

Thanks

-Rich

It all depends on what you want to do with it.. regular old mac stuff? HFS+

basically I want to be able to read\write data on that drive on both mac and pc... theres a program for pc isnt there that allows you to read\write on the hfs+ format isnt there? I remember PC users having to get it when the ipod first came out...

-Rich

Never heard of that.. doesn't mean it doesn't exist though.

Edit: Using this?

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

quite possibly, but I'd rather have a filesystem that both OS's can read natively as I would be taking this around to with me pretty much everywhere I go so I could plug it into other peoples machines without worrying about installing software for it..

-Rich

Wireless!!
 

Ok well the Mac will work with your wireless LAN assuming:

1. it's using 802.11b or 802.11g!!
****802.11a is not supported*****

2. If you are using WEP (encryption) then you might have to enter the HEX rather than the phrase as the Mac uses a different coding scheme..You should be able to get the Hex from the router..

Cheers,
--Zed :cool:

yea, it's 11b, and I dont use wep I live in a very non-tech area so I dont worry about that and just use mac address filtering..

-Rich

In that case you should have no problems...

I've used my wireless powerbook G4 on all sorts of third party base stations..In fact I've never used it on an Apple one :)

Cheers,
--Zed :cool:

you ever used it on Intel 2011 stuff? just thats what we've got here at work, and I've tried using non-intel stuff on it before now and it didnt wanna play ball... we're using 40bit wep, and no mac filtering.. and it just didnt wanna have any of it when I was using my dlink card at work.. I had the suspicion it was because we use channel 11 at work rather than the default (which is 6 for the UK I believe)...

if you could shed any light on this I'd be ever so greatful..

Try providing the 40 bit HEX string to the client rather than the pass phrase..

Cheers,
--Zed :cool:

There is no such animal.. You're better off trying to use a CD-RW.

is there not a program\anything that I can get it to read windows file systems in osx? (like ntfs driver for linux...) ?

yeah, it's called the network. i think you'll get a lot more mileage out of that disk if you make a slice of it shared to the rigs on your network.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...30102054242156 the power of google!

on this very site no less!

But can you copy Mac files from the Fat32 drive back to the Mac? I don't think so. Once a Mac file hits the Fat32 formatted drive I would assume that it gets stripped into it's data fork and resource fork. How do you put those back together on the Mac side once separated?

Yeah but how would you do that? FAT32 would be the only way I can think of. I have tried to partition a HD 1/2 HFS+ and 1/2 NTFS and my conclusion was that it cannot be done. With FAT32 you could take the HD to each machine and both Mac OS X, and XP would mount it. I guess you could make it a network drive on an linux/unix box. Then use something like samba to share it over the network then all machines (which you allow) on your network could use it for data storage.

Yes you can, I download a tons of mac updates on my win98/FAT32 machine becuase its the only machine in my work area that has a cd burner, burn them to cd and take them to the macs. Also since I work in both a windows/mac enviroment I have 2 work stations one PC, and one G4. They are networked and depending on what machine I am on I will push/pull files over the network. I have tons of firmware updates on my PC since it has my huge data storage drive on it. I constantly copy the firmware updates from my pc via network, or CDR, and it works fine.

If I were you I would strongly consider the 12"PBAl. I've used both and the PB is well worth the extra couple of bucks (especially since yesterday's price drop.)

Also - based on the recent price drop I would guess an nice update is in the wings in the very near future.

The rev 1 is a terrific machine and I suspect that the rev2 will be fantastic.

Hugh

Back to the Hard Drive
 

OK... if you share a FAT32 formatted PC Firewire drive that's connected to a PC, it will mount and read/write just fine from OSX.

However, if you try to plug that hard drive directly into the Mac, without the PC, the drive will not mount under OSX. It will, however, mount with OS9.2.

What gives?

Re: Back to the Hard Drive
 

Dunno, My 40 gig IDE in a FW enclosure works flawlessly, and its partitioned in FAT32. It will mount when I directly plug it into the G4, or the XP box. Are you 100% sure the drive is formatted in FAT32? Try updating your FW drivers off of apples website, try updating them from the HD's website. view your system log to see if anything fishy happening, copy/paste any errors its displaying.

Let us know what you find

I actually answered my own question in another thread, but the result is that Apple's OSX operating system doesn't handle DOS formatted disks as robustly (Apple's own words) as OS9.2 did, due to limitations of the UNIX infrastructure.

The problem is not the FAT32 formatting, you are correct.... it's that the hard drive I was trying to mount is 160GB. Apple says that anything over 128GB must be partitioned into multiple, smaller partitions in order to properly mount to the desktop.

On the other hand, I plugged the drive into a Windows laptop that is on my home network, and using OSX "connect to server" (I enabled sharing on the drive in Windows), I was able to connect to the laptop via its IP address, and mount the drive on my desktop as a server, no problem.

Actually, one problem... the ethernet network effectively cut the transfer rate of the firewire drive by about half...

Gary

ethernet = 100Mbps

Firewire = 400Mbps

So yeah unless you are running gigabit, or fiber, FW will be faster.