Got an External 120gb drive, want to use it both on mac and PC. What file system to use?

[SwiftWind]

Recommendations? I Know nothing about OS X's ability to work with file systems

Thanks!

 

[mwmorph]

fat32
windows supports it. mac supports it. ntfs is a big no no fro mac. not sure about support for fat16. you might need to partion it into like 30 smaller partitions for it to work.

 

[SwiftWind]

Well now I tried FAT32, seems like fat32 says its too big too...NTFS Is the only thing that will format it under windows. I haven't tried it on a mac but I was reading at a mac site that OS X has issues writing to NTFS? supposably it will be fixed in Tiger?

 

[CMar]

Fat 32. The maker of the drive should have a driver that allowes it to be suported by windows.

 

[JetBlack69]

Originally posted by: SwiftWind
Well now I tried FAT32, seems like fat32 says its too big too...NTFS Is the only thing that will format it under windows. I haven't tried it on a mac but I was reading at a mac site that OS X has issues writing to NTFS? supposably it will be fixed in Tiger?

Can the mac format it in FAT32? WinXP set an artifical limit on the drive size FAT32 supports. It set that limit to 40GB I think and forces you to go with NTFS.

 

[SwiftWind]

Ahh, I see. I'll give it a shot. I haven't tried to format it on a mac.I don't have a mac at home. I just wanted to save the headache of bringing it to our mac lab here. I think I'll have to though.

 

[mwmorph]

well, use ntfs, make 3 40gig partitions and thne format it with fat32.

 

[biostud]

I have a 250Gb external drive formatted in FAT32

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: mwmorph
well, use ntfs, make 3 40gig partitions and thne format it with fat32.

That didn't make any sense to me?

Anyway, WinXP itself doesn't limit FAT32, only it's tool, so you can't format drives >32 GB with FAT32 under XP, however reading them is no problem.
So, you'll just have to format it to FAT32 using some tool that supports it, then it'll work under XP.