external drive questions

[furcalchick]

i'm going to be setting up an external firewire drive tonight after my scare from last night involving a bad program and kernel panics, and i have a few questions about how i want to set it up how i want it to set up.

firstly, it's going to house data from multiple computers (mac and various pc files from several other computers).

secondly, i would like it to be able to boot a clean version of os x 10.4.8 as well as back up all of my data so that i don't lose it. i'll be using superduper (the free version for now) to back up my data on my mac.

thirdly, i need to access the files of the external hard drive from any computer in the house, due to #1.

thanks for your help, i know it's alot of requests.

 

[lamina]

For now, OS X.4 doesn't support writing to NTFS drives, which really sucks. HFS+ is great, but Windows won't natively recognize it, requiring drivers or a program to read from and write to a HFS+ partition.

Your best bet is multiple partitions, one for Mac-only (HFS+), one for PC-only (NTFS), one for files you will be sharing between the OS's (your best format would be FAT32, despite its 4GB filesize limit), and your OS X boot partition (HFS+).

I really hope Leopard's release will find a way to read/write NTFS.

 

[furcalchick]

i think i'll just keep the drive mac-only for now at least, as it looks like it's pretty complex and alot of hassle. and i have other backup methods for my pc. here's the plan now.

three partitions (all mac)

1. bootable backup (around 80 gigs)
2. fresh install backup, also bootable (5-10 gigs)
3. data, not bootable (the rest)

thoughts?

 

[johnmacfan]

How exactly do you partition the external drive to use with the boot camp ( PC ) and the mac? I have a MBP and would like to get an external drive to store files because my drive is getting full. Thanks in advance.

 

[furcalchick]

How exactly do you partition the external drive to use with the boot camp ( PC ) and the mac? I have a MBP and would like to get an external drive to store files because my drive is getting full. Thanks in advance.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html

this should help. and also see this: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=64094

that should help you out.

 

[lamina]

three partitions (all mac)

1. bootable backup (around 80 gigs)
2. fresh install backup, also bootable (5-10 gigs)
3. data, not bootable (the rest)

thoughts?

Sounds great, especially if you'd image your drive once a week to the 80GB partition. How big of a drive are you thinking about?

 

[furcalchick]

my internal is 80 gb, my external is 320, so plenty of space.

and i decided to go against the fresh boot partition of os x (for now), as i saw that was going to be really too much work.

and one more thing, i heard from the mac genius that i can't boot from my macbook to my external using usb, but there are some articles i read that say otherwise, and that i can boot from the usb (with the intels). i hope i can boot via usb, because my firewire is not working right now.

i may upgrade to 10.4.9 in the next few days.

 

[furcalchick]

updates

update: made a backup of my hard drive using superduper and according to the startup panel in system preferences, it's a bootable drive from my usb port on my macbook. but i have two more concerns.

1. i'm planning to host transferred windows files in one of the partitions via network of the other computers, will i have to reformat it so that the others can dump their files over? i have my mac files over there too though.

2. i'm mulling over having a fresh install in a new third partition of the drive, for instance when 10.5 comes out as a fresh version of that or to have a fresh install of 10.4.8 handy in case both my main and backup files are inaccessible. i heard you have to change this partition to guid from the master format it is in default for this to be a bootable partition, but that will also mean the hard drive will become unusable for any other computer expect this one. can someone help me with this?

and i think there should be a section on external hard drives and booting on the mac guides, as this looks to be a major issue and no central sources around.