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AEBS + PC + Mac + 2 Partitions on Seagate FreeAgent?

C

CLuv

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 9, 2007
293
2
Northern VA, USA
Is it possible to have one HDD (Seagate FreeAgent Pro 320GB) connected to the AEBS, and have it set up with 2 partitions? 1 for the Mac, and the other 1 for the PC? The Mac partition would be HFS+ and the PC will be FAT32. The PC side will not be used that much at all and won't be that large, just enough to back up my gf's iTunes library and some docs. The other side will be for my use with Time Machine when Leopard comes out.
I don't know if it matters, but I will be connecting a HP All-in-One Photosmart C3100 to the AEBS also so we can print remotely.

Any input or advice is welcomed, especially if anyone has done something similar or exactly the same, since I plan to set this up this weekend.

-Thanks
 
with my old AEBS i could never get this to work, however with the newer ones i think that it could actually be possible. the windoze pc wouldnt recognise the HFS+ i hope you know.
 
DoFot9, thanks. Yea, I don't want the PC to be able to read my side at all so no accidental deletions are made that's why I want my partition to be HFS+.
 
DoFoT9, interesting and thanks. I plan to start setting up this network this evening. I also double checked and asked a Mac Genius when I swung by the Apple Store today, and they said it should work, since my gf's side will be FAT32.
Looks like from what I've read, it does work as long as the drive is FAT and not NTFS. I guess I'll find out, and post my results. Good thing her side will only be 20GB.
 
CLuv said:
DoFoT9, interesting and thanks. I plan to start setting up this network this evening. I also double checked and asked a Mac Genius when I swung by the Apple Store today, and they said it should work, since my gf's side will be FAT32.
Looks like from what I've read, it does work as long as the drive is FAT and not NTFS. I guess I'll find out, and post my results. Good thing her side will only be 20GB.
Click to expand...

ok yea i agree that a fat32 & HFS+ should work. i hope it does, if not then you could always get the program macdrive which will let windoze see HFS+ formats. (it costs moneis)
good luck with it all
DoFoT9
 
DoFoT9, got everything installed. I installed the USB Hub, the Printer, and the Seagate drive to the AEBS, and then installed the Airport Utility on my MacBook. Then installed Airport Disk Utility on my gf's windoze laptop. I could see the Seagate drive even though I hadn't partitioned it yet. I then shut her laptop down, connected the Seagate drive directly to my laptop to then proceed to setup the partitions. Weird thing was, when I would click on partition after setting the sizes, and then the confirmation screen, I got the message, could not partition unable to unmount disk. I don't know if installing the AEBS software first might have caused this issue. So I reconnected the drive to the AEBS, restarted my gf's laptop, and attempted to create a folder and move a pdf file to the seagate drive which was formatted before all of this took place to Mac OS Journaled (Extended). I was able to create the folder, and move the pdf file to her backup folder. I then started up my laptop, and saw her folder and the file and was able to open and print from both machines.

So, I decided to right click on the network drive on my MacBook's laptop and Get Info, sure enough the format of the drive is now labeled AppleShare no longer HFS Extended. Even though I never formatted it to be FAT, and was unable to turn it into a 2 partition drive, I have no problem reading/writing from my gf's laptop.

The Airport Utility obviously makes some sort of change to the network drive, in order for an NTFS drive be able to read and write since it had no problems with it. I also noticed the drive on my gf's laptop is labled CIFS on NetServer (I believe that was it).

I guess you can say it works, but not the way I envisioned since I can't seem to get the drive to unmount during the partition process, but she's now got her own folder to backup important docs and iTunes.

If you have any ideas, I'm open to them just so I can learn some more tricks.

Thanks for your help, input, and links.

On another note, the printer works great for both machines through the AEBS.
 
CLuv, its good too see that it's working well, albeit not how you wanted it to.

I believe that the default formatting of the drive was FAT32, and that would be why both your MB and your gf's windoze laptop can read and write. I would suggest using "Disk Utility" (plug the harddrive directly into your MB) to format it correctly and see if everything works ok.

I think that the drive would be FAT32, which is a bottleneck because you can't put files bigger than 4gb onto the drive. It may prove costly in the future, so I would want it to be sorted out ASAP.

Good to see that the printer is working :)

DoFoT9
 
The Seagate's don't support Mac, so you have to format them with Disk Utility since they are NTFS drives out of the box. Majority of WD drives do, but I went with Seagate due to the warranty, and I've never had any issues with them unlike some bad luck with WD drives. I formatted it as an Mac OS Extended (Journaled) within Disk Utility right after I bought it. I searched AppleShare, and here's the link I found, pretty interesting. Also explains why my gf's laptop can see it even though it was originally and HFS+ drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleShare
 
CLuv said:
So, I decided to right click on the network drive on my MacBook's laptop and Get Info, sure enough the format of the drive is now labeled AppleShare no longer HFS Extended.
Click to expand...
Of course - that is the way it works.You never address a networked volume as the native disk format -- you are addressing the network filing system, whether that is AFP or SMB or NFS or whatever.

CLuv said:
Even though I never formatted it to be FAT, and was unable to turn it into a 2 partition drive, I have no problem reading/writing from my gf's laptop.
Click to expand...
Yes, because she is addressing the network server, not the drive.
CLuv said:
The Airport Utility obviously makes some sort of change to the network drive, in order for an NTFS drive be able to read and write since it had no problems with it.
Click to expand...
No, the Airport base station is Serving the drive. Presumably the drive is already in a format the base station can address, such as FAT32
 
CanadaRAM, thanks now it is even clearer then the information about AppleShare on wiki. Since I know the drive couldn't change from HFS+ to FAT in the matter of seconds, because it took close to 3 hours for the drive to go from NTFS to HFS+ when I started this whole process on Thursday when I first bought the drive.
 
I have a similar setup (G4 and HP XP notebook connected to AEBS w/ seagate drive) all is good except the only way I could even connect the PC to the AEBS is by turning the encryption to NONE!!!!. :mad:What wireless adapter (brand/specs) does your machine use? I really need this info as I worked w/ 5 hrs. w/ apple today and they cannot find a solution. i have a new linksys wireless adapter but it is only 64 and 128 bit for WEP encryption. Even that didn't work with a 13 letter password. We could only get up an running with encryption set to NONE!!!!!!! please help. I'm burned out!
 
I have an 802.11n in my MacBook and my girlfriend's laptop is using an N wireless usb adapter. My AEBS is set to WPA2 with Mac Address Filtering enabled. I read somewhere that you don't want to set your drive to use encryption. Can't remember where I read that though.
I hope that helps.
 
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