external hard drive format suggestions sought

[killmeplease]

sorry for the noob question but...

i just learned about fat32, jouraled etc. formats. it came as annoying news to me that fat32 has a 4gb file size limit. i already have more than 500gb of data on my 2tb external which unfortunately is formatted in fat32. i have lots of files larger than 4gb i want to move. ive used split and concat to move them and thought that then i could re-join them, but i still run into file size limits and when i rejoin them they are missing data.

i would like to be able to play files directly from the external using vlc, but cant without rejoining them. and i cant rejoin them in the external b/c they are larger than 4gb

copying them back to my mac mini to join and watch is a pain in the neck of a work around. suggestions?

i dont have anyplace to put my 500gb to reformat to mac journaled, and i would like to be able to use the drive with both mac and pc if possible.

is there a video splitter that can handle hi-def .ts .mkv files that split the files into parts that can be loaded into vlc playlist and watched seamlessly?


im a cheapskate, so i prefer opensource options.

thanks in advance.

 

[treestar]

I think you are pretty screwed. Find a friend that can help you store your media temporarily, reformat, and copy your data back. 2 TB is a huge amount of space to format under an old and featureless file system. You probably do not need to use your drive with PCs.

I was a PC user, I also started using Macs. I tried to keep my external drives Mac and PC friendly. It was a waste of time. Anything I need to transfer I can do over ethernet and it is faster. Further, I was really taking my chances not using a Journaled file system with an external. What if I got disconnected?

Then SL came along with exFAT support and I thought it was great, but while exFAT works with Windows 7 and 10.6, it hardly works at all for older OS's. Sharing files with anyone but myself was hopeless.

I don't know the specifics of FAT32 in this case, but if it were Mac OS Extended then you could make a partition of empty space and reformat it. If you can do that with FAT then you can make a new partition in HFS+, copy your data there, then reformat the other partition and maybe be able to reunite them.

If you do get to reformat your drive, keep a small partition in FAT to exchange files between PCs. You don't have to format all 2 TB in one file system. If you want you can leave the partition unformatted and then format it as NTFS on a PC when you get a chance. OS X can read NTFS natively.

 

[satcomer]

What I did on my Windows partition was install MacDrive so windows can see and write to my already Apple formatted drives. I also could format in windows 7 (with MacDive installed) and format an external Drive for Mac OS Extended.

This setup works real well for me and it might work well for you.