Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

External 160 GB HDD: which filesystem?

K

koswo

macrumors member
Original poster
Hello,

I'm going to buy an external hard disk drive (SmartDisk CrossFire 160 GB). I want to use it on both, my G3 iMac (I have Mac OS X 10.3 running on it) and my girlfriend's Windows XP laptop. What filesystem do I have to format it in to be able to read/write from both systems?

Thanks

koswo
 
i believe you'll want to format it in FAT32, because winxp and osx can both read/write to that. xp can't do anything with hfs+ and osx can read to ntfs but can't write to it.
 
Sadly enough it will have to be FAT32 .. though I never had problems with that it does feel like cheating .. 😛
 
Mertzen said:
Sadly enough it will have to be FAT32 .. though I never had problems with that it does feel like cheating .. 😛
Click to expand...
You'll have problems when you try to do things like back up your home directory. FAT32 doesn't support "aliases" (which I think are just *NIX symlinks, but I could be wrong), so you're bound to have problems w/ things like iPhoto albums.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back