External NTFS drive through Mac OSX

[dchakrab]

Ok...here's the scenario:

I have an NTFS external disk with several volumes on it. All are formatted in NTFS under Windows XP. I realised belatedly that OSX will only read from an NTFS drive, and not write to it.

How do i reformat this drive? Mac OSX's disk utility won't let me do it...possibly because the drives are mounting as read-only in the first place.

Also, i would like to reformat to Fat32, so i can use the drive under both Windows and MacOS...can i do this through Mac OS? Are there any freeware format utilities i could use under Mac OS to make this work? What's the maximum file size under Fat 32? Is this recommended at all?

Will a windows XP or 98 machine be able to read and write to the drive if it's formatted to whatever file system OSX uses natively?

I'm planning to transfer all my data to a Mac OS machine, and then copy it back once i have the drive formatted properly...

All comments and suggestions appreciated,

Dave.

 

[spyordie007]

Hook the drive back up to an XP machine and reformat the partitions to FAT32. Than you should be able to use it under XP, Windows 98 and Mac OS X. I'd like to think that there is going to be a way to reformat it from OS X, but I'm not terribly familier with what options it makes available or the path to execute them....

Will a windows XP or 98 machine be able to read and write to the drive if it's formatted to whatever file system OSX uses natively?

Not nativly. I'm not sure what filesystem OS X uses nativly (not sure if they are still using HFS or something else nowadays). If you want Windows to read it you'll have to use 3rd party software.

 

[spamsk8r]

Mac OS X uses HFS+, which is a journalized version of HFS.

 

[n0cmonkey]

HFS+ isn't necessarily journalling. 😉

Unmount the disk (drag the icon to the trash), and try it. But you probably can't format it fat32.

 

[dchakrab]

hmmm...is there some way to format it from the terminal command line, which might allow formatting using other file formats?

Will XP be able to read HFS+?

Thanks,

Dave.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: dchakrab
hmmm...is there some way to format it from the terminal command line, which might allow formatting using other file formats?

Maybe. Look in /sbin for something like newfs, mkfs, mknewfs, etc.

Will XP be able to read HFS+?

Thanks,

Dave.

Probably not.

 

[timbck2]

How do i reformat this drive? Mac OSX's disk utility won't let me do it...possibly because the drives are mounting as read-only in the first place.

Unmount the drive, but do not unplug it. Disk Utility should now let you select the drive (the whole drive) and repartition it.

Failing that, you can repartition and format it from the Terminal:

sudo diskutil partitionDisk disk[I]n[/I] 1 MBR fat32 [I]partition_name[/I] R

where n is the disk identifier number shown by "diskutil list", and partition_name is a name of your choosing. The "R" at the end says to use the remainder of the disk for the partition (in this case the entire disk).