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#255624 - 07/05/2005 16:25 Windows XP, Mac OSX compatibile filesystem?
TigerJimmy old hand Registered: 15/02/2002 Posts: 1049	Hi everyone, Does this kind of beast exist? A friend of mine wants to get a large firewire external disk, initially using it on a PC with Windows XP, then putting it on a mini Mac. I suggested Samba, but he is linux/UNIX illiteriate and does not want to use a server. This will be a large "disk". Actually he wants to buy one of the 500GB firewire jobs, which I believe are two disks with a hardware RAID controller, but I may be wrong. Anyway, the filesystem needs to support a very large partition (500GB). IIRC, this can't be done with FAT32, or am I wrong? I'm not familiar with OSX's ability to deal with other filesystems. I thought that it could read and write FAT32, but then the filesystem size becomes an issue. Can this be done? Thanks in advance, Jim
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#255625 - 07/05/2005 16:39 Re: Windows XP, Mac OSX compatibile filesystem? [Re: TigerJimmy]
TigerJimmy old hand Registered: 15/02/2002 Posts: 1049	I've learned about MacDrive. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there alternatives? Jim
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#255626 - 07/05/2005 16:51 Re: Windows XP, Mac OSX compatibile filesystem? [Re: TigerJimmy]
peter carpal tunnel Registered: 13/07/2000 Posts: 4180 Loc: Cambridge, England	Quote: Anyway, the filesystem needs to support a very large partition (500GB). IIRC, this can't be done with FAT32, or am I wrong? FAT32 filesystems can be up to 2TB (2048GB). However, Windows won't let you create filesystems that big: you'll have to do the initial format under Linux (or OS X, if that lets you make big FAT filesystems). Windows will use a filesystem that big perfectly happily, just its formatter is nobbled. Edit: You can get mkdosfs for Windows, which isn't nobbled and can format large FAT filesystems. Editto: Mind you, on a 500 billion byte disk, the FAT itself will be over 58MB in size (4 bytes per cluster, 32Kbyte clusters). You'd better not plan on mounting that filesystem on machines that are short of memory. Peter
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#255627 - 07/05/2005 18:21 Re: Windows XP, Mac OSX compatibile filesystem? [Re: TigerJimmy]
DWallach carpal tunnel Registered: 30/04/2000 Posts: 3810	Quote: I suggested Samba, but he is linux/UNIX illiteriate and does not want to use a server. While it's certainly a more difficult solution, it makes an awful lot of sense once you get it working. If you use one of these small form factor PCs, you can probably cobble it together as a turn-key appliance. At one point in time, I think there were even several startups trying to sell such things as all-in-one home networking appliances, although I don't know where to look for whatever might have survived the collapse of the dot com bubble.
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#255628 - 08/05/2005 00:14 Re: Windows XP, Mac OSX compatibile filesystem? [Re: peter]
mlord carpal tunnel Registered: 29/08/2000 Posts: 14491 Loc: Canada	Quote: Edit: You can get mkdosfs for Windows, which isn't nobbled and can format large FAT filesystems. And the same mkdosfs is a stock command under Linux. Cheers
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#255629 - 08/05/2005 12:15 Re: Windows XP, Mac OSX compatibile filesystem? [Re: TigerJimmy]
wfaulk carpal tunnel Registered: 25/12/2000 Posts: 16706 Loc: Raleigh, NC US	There are network attached storage appliances that are consumer-grade and use Windows Network filesharing to do their business. They should be accessible from both Windows and MacOS X, but it'd technically be a server. Since I'm not sure what his objection is there, I don't know if that'd help. _________________________ Bitt Faulk
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