External 160 GB HDD: which filesystem?

[koswo]

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

 

[homerjward]

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.

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

FAT32 is where it's at right now.

Maybe Tiger will finally add real NTFS functionality to OS X.

 

[Mertzen]

Sadly enough it will have to be FAT32 .. though I never had problems with that it does feel like cheating ..

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

Sadly enough it will have to be FAT32 .. though I never had problems with that it does feel like cheating ..

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.