Macintosh & external firewire hard drive question

[asuh]

I hope someone knows this answer. I am looking at connecting an external firewire hard drive to a macintosh running OS 9.1. If I connect an 80GB or 120GB hard drive with FAT32, will the macintosh read the disc alright? I'm doing this for pro audio purposes.

 

[John]

Yes.

 

[asuh]

And just to verify, if the OS is only 8.0 on the Mac, does the same still apply? Also, staying in the NTFS file system (formatted by XP) will do me no good with any OS version earlier than OS X?

 

[asuh]

Unfortunately, when I connected my firewire drive to the Mac, it wouldn't recognize the FAT32. I used Partition Magic 8 to change the file system to FAT32 from XP's version of NTFS. I'm going to try to format the drive and partition it to a 40GB and 80GB and see if that works. Any other suggestions?

 

[John]

Originally posted by: asuh
Unfortunately, when I connected my firewire drive to the Mac, it wouldn't recognize the FAT32. I used Partition Magic 8 to change the file system to FAT32 from XP's version of NTFS. I'm going to try to format the drive and partition it to a 40GB and 80GB and see if that works. Any other suggestions?

Huh? MacOS 9x reads fat32 no problem. Partition size really should not matter.

 

[asuh]

That's what I'm told. But I tried twice to connect the firewire drive to the Mac and it said it didn't reognize any readable systems so it was wanting to format the drive.

Speaking of which, if I go ahead and format the drive with the Mac OS system, whatever it might be, would I be able to connect that system to my Windows OS? Or would Windows in turn try to format it back to NTFS?

 

[John]

TTBOMK, the Windows OS will not be able to read the MacOS. Maybe there is some type of "convertor" program but I am not aware of one.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: asuh
And just to verify, if the OS is only 8.0 on the Mac, does the same still apply? Also, staying in the NTFS file system (formatted by XP) will do me no good with any OS version earlier than OS X?

8.0? Are you sure it isn't something newer, like at least 8.6(it would have to be; 8.5.1 was the first G3 OS)? Even at that OS, you should think about going to at least 9.04, if not "all the way" up to 9.2.2.

PS John, you're thinking of MacOpener

 

[asuh]

i was just being theoretical. I found out it was a Mac OS 9.1. I tried connecting and no luck. I then came back, reformatted, partitioned, and still no luck when I connected it.

A tech guy tried messing with the file extention manager or something that sounds like this (I don't know Macs at all) and tried messing with some of the settings. There's another option that I'm going to try tomorrow but if that doesn't work, I'm out of luck.

I have to get the FAT32 to read on the Mac because I have a 24 track, 12 song project that I need to mix on Pro Tools. It's crazy because I have until next Thursday to get it done...

 

[ViRGE]

MacOS 9 is definately FAT32 compatible. Make sure that the drive really is in FAT32 format, and use the "drive setup" tool once you connect the drive, just to see if it has anything useful to say. If you're still stumped, Apple's discussion forums at their support website should be able to offer some help.

 

[asuh]

Well, after a tech guy upgraded MacOS to version 9.2.1, it finally worked. So I could get into my hard drive and see all the files.

Now there's one more problem. I don't know if there's even a solution to this problem but it's worth asking. Is it possible to format a hard drive with two partitions, one HFS and the other FAT32? If so, how do you accomplish this?

 

[asuh]

The errors I got were a (-120) error and I couldn't save to the FAT32 from the Mac. Does anyone know about this?

 

[Eug]

FAT32 works on the Mac, but it's a bit flaky at times, esp. in Mac OS X. (I think it's better in OS 9, but I don't use OS 9 enough to really comment. I hate OS 9. 😉)

Better is simply to use HFS+ in Windows.

MacDrive 5 rules.

The only problem though is the drive won't work on Windows machines without MacDrive of course.

Originally posted by: asuh
The errors I got were a (-120) error and I couldn't save to the FAT32 from the Mac. Does anyone know about this?

I can't remember what the error number was, but when I used Mac OS X with FAT32, sometimes there were some filename issues. Files with weird characters couldn't be saved (eg. "?"). I got around this by renaming the files. However, I don't think this is your problem as I think my error might have been (-50).

 

[asuh]

I solved my initial problem. I had to get another hard drive, format it in OS X (because OS 9 wouldn't recognize it as a supported drive being that it's firewire). I copied the files from the FAT32 to the HFS and had no more problems.

FAT32 is usable on a Mac, but with the software I was using I couldn't save or open any of the files correctly. This wasn't made clear by the manufacturer so it was a lot of wasted time trying to get things done.




Is it possible to partition a hard drive with two partitions: one with HFS and one with FAT32? If so, how?! I've tried everything.