Disk Format for external hard drive question [SOLVED]

dufeu · l33t Joined: 30 Aug 2002 Posts: 924 Location: US-FL-EST

I haven't a clue for how to search for this in the forums so I don't know if it's already answered. If it has been answered already, I apologise in advance. My secondary question would be what search terms I should use in order to find the information I'm looking for.

My neice is bringing me an external hard drive to copy some of my files from my computer to hers. She's visiting from about 1,000 miles away so it's not like I can carry my computer down the street for her and hook it to her network. It's also not really practical to transmit the files over the internet as we're talking about 800 gigs worth of data {from 4,000 gigs I have currently on my system}.

The target comput is a Mac running OS 10.

The question is which filesystem should I use to reformat the external hard drive?

Thoughts? Limitations?

Worst case, I can partition the drive into 320 gig chunks and format the chunks as FAT32. Not particularly efficient but doable.

Edit

I saw that someone "reported" this topic. I'm guessing that the claim is that this topic has nothing to do with gentoo/linux at all?

FWIW, several points:

In essence, this drive will need to talk to Gentoo GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows. I'm pretty sure I'll be hooking this drive up to my personal workstation in the future. No more than several times a year but ...

Mods, please feel free to delete if this topic actually doesn't belong. Though I do think this thread may be of help to others in the future.
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cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

Having been there and done this before, I had loads of problems with NTFS but then I had quite a few with Windows messing up with fat32 also.

The best thing to do is leave the external HDD as NTFS and just install ntfs.3g/FUSE on the linux boxes and MacFUSE on the OSX boxes

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
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avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152

IIRC, linux can write to HFS+, as long as it's not formatted with a journal. So if you don't mind building a kernel module and merging some stuff, that should be a good way since she won't have a problem when she's back at home.

Besides, OSX has read-support for XFS and there's also support for NTFS IIRC.

Bones McCracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1611 Location: U.S.A.

To make things as easy as possible for her, I would say hfsplus (which is in the kernel configuration under "miscellaneous file systems". The hfs and hsf+ support on linux used to be kind of sketchy, but I think it has improved now. Hopefully somebody will give a second opinion on this.

Assuming the disk is set up with an Apple disk format, you will also need to be able to mount an Apple partition, so you will need:
>File systems
>>Partition Types
>>>Advanced partition selection
>>>>Macintosh partition map support

All of this is subject to a second opinion from the experts in the ppc forum.

A better place to ask would be the gentoo ppc forum. I have asked that this thread be moved there.
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drizek · Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 9:57 pm Post subject:

Ya, use NTFS. It actually installs really easily on macs these days.
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Bones McCracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1611 Location: U.S.A.

mdeininger · Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 10:20 pm Post subject:

last time i tried, ntfs worked read-only on macos 10.4 without a hitch, so depending on which way you wanna copy files it'd be a cinch...
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big dave · Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 11:24 pm Post subject:

fat. the end.

anyone saying otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about, or is using files with a filesize exceeding 4gb.

fat32 is by far the most platform-independent filesystem around.

Bones McCracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1611 Location: U.S.A.

dufeu · l33t Joined: 30 Aug 2002 Posts: 924 Location: US-FL-EST

I'd like to thank everyone for their comments.

I've never had regular use of any Mac so I'm not savvy as to what's available etc. So everyone's responses and comments were educational.

After reading your reponses and getting a much better idea of what to search for, I did a bit of more sensible googling and have come up with a plan which we think will satisfy the need.

The plan is:

The goal is to be able to transfer files back and forth between her Mac and her boyfriend's Windows based laptop.

FAT32 is out because of:

She also accepts that she will not be installing and executing any Mac based programs on the external hard drive.

I already make use of ntfs-3g for my gentoo based workstation so my being able to write to the drive isn't a problem.

The reason for creating a new DOS type partition table is that the "out of the box" configuration is designed to be 'bootable' under Windows. It supports the "one touch back up" concept etc. Since the drive will be used to basically transfer files between Mac and Windows, going with a regular plain old DOS partition table should avoid having Windows attempt to run the factory installed software every time it's plugged in.

FWIW, we've confirmed that Mac OS 10 will read and write FAT32 and read only NTFS "out of the box". Understanding that was one of my open questions.

Thanks very much for the pointer to MacFUSE. The software we were looking at for the Mac end in order to be able to write from the Mac to the external drive was Paragin's NTFS for Mac. It's great to have a choice.

Also FWIW, My First Mac has a decent discussion of the options. It's not complete as it only discusses the choices for Windows and MacOS. But it give a pretty clear explanation of what's what.
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cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

the FUSE system is definitely the way to go
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dufeu · l33t Joined: 30 Aug 2002 Posts: 924 Location: US-FL-EST

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

in OSX leopard I just downloaded the drivers and wrote to my girlfriend's external hard drive. There was no complicated procedure.
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timeBandit · Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2010 5:30 pm Post subject:

Moved from Off the Wall to Other Things Gentoo.
Better off here than Gentoo on PPC (as suggested) because there really isn't anything PPC-specific about the Gentoo side of the question.