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Just needed to share...

L

Lougle

macrumors member
Original poster
May 1, 2005
86
4
New York City
I have had my 1.33GHz 12" Power Book since they were released (almost a year now) and am going to buy a Power Mac in a view weeks. I am on a 3GHz P4 right now and thought I would always use (and need) a Windows machine. After upgrading to Tiger (it is soooo great) I have the sudden urge to sell my PC (well almost) and move to OS X totally. Spotlight alone makes it worth it. I am finding the wait until the end of the month (when I will be in a better financial situation) to buy my Power Mac slow and painful. I feel like saying "f**k the money" and whipping out my credit card right now. How do the rest of you manage? And I guess reading all the posts titled "I just got my dual 2.7's" doesn't help. Anyone else out there a border line switcher or like to dance the fine line in between?

-Lou

PS: I am so ready to move completely to OS X I was thinking about reformatting my external HD for use on a mac. Does Tiger only offer READ ONLY access to drives formatted under NTFS like the versions of OS X before it? Thanks!
 
if you want to keep your harddrive cross platform format it for Fat32 and it will work with both OS X and Windows without a problem, OS X can only read from NTFS
 
Yes, I know that. I was hoping Tiger changed that but I guess not. There is one more problem now. I can't get Windows XP to format a drive FAT32. The only option I have is NTFS. Does anyone know how I can format the drive to FAT32 in Windows or can OS X format a drive to FAT32? Thanks.
 
I swear I had Windows XP on a FAT32 drive once... Maybe the ability to format to FAT32 was removed with SP2? I've never used SP2, only used SP1 and below.

Anyway, you lucky dog. We're in a similar situation at the moment, we both REALLY want a PowerMac, and we're about to sell our PCs soon. But the difference between us is that you WILL get your PowerMac soon, and I'm resisting buying a PowerMac because I want my Mac mini to last about 2 years. You only have to wait for a defined moment, while I have nothing but my conscience (blow $$$ on a PowerMac where it could be better used elsewhere).

My answer? Check out the 'tar.
 
Lougle said:
Yes, I know that. I was hoping Tiger changed that but I guess not. There is one more problem now. I can't get Windows XP to format a drive FAT32. The only option I have is NTFS. Does anyone know how I can format the drive to FAT32 in Windows or can OS X format a drive to FAT32? Thanks.
Click to expand...

if you hook the drive up to your powerbook you should be able to format it under FAT32 in DiskUtility
 
In Windows Disk Manager you can create multiple parttions, if each partition is no greater then 32GB, you will have th option to format the drive as FAT32. Toruble is if you have a very large external drive you may need a LOT of partitions. I'm not sure what it is (in Windows XP), but there is a limit to the number of partitions you can have; I think that it is 4 or 8.
 
I have had a drive formatted to FAT32 before. It was a 120GB external. The one I would want to format is 250GB. I know that FAT32 has trouble with large partition sizes but I know I have had it before. That was before I upgraded to SP2 thought... What do you think?
 
Try DOS. I think the DOS format command will help you here. Or you can mkfs.vfat on linux if you have linux somewhere.
 
the facts...

1. the biggest fat32 we can make is 32 gigs. :(
2. disk utility under os x can format a drive as fat32. (though I suggest cfdisk under linux :p )
3. os x can read and write fat32. :)
4. os x can only read ntfs. :(
5. the most partitions we can have on a drive (MBR, not extended) is 4.
6. if our disk is bigger than 4x32=128 gigs, we're SOL for any more than 128 gigs. :(
7. we will not want to format the drives under windows or dos. os x or linux offer better tools for this, imho.

best of luck!
 
You can format 120GB drives in FAT32 (in earlier version of Windows at least, don't know about XP SP2). 160GB drives had something in them to allow full formatting in less than 48-bit large block addressing (the thing that allows for over 137GB to be read without partitioning). I use MediaFour's MacDrive to access a drive on both PCs and Macs, and I think Partition Magic can do it too (though it's a pain sometimes), but I guess if OS X can format a larger drive in FAT32 and XP can read it, you'll be ok.

You can certainly do over 32GB in FAT32, but perhaps XP has made that harder.
 
Humm, you can reformat your hard drive in HFS+ if you want? why stick with Fat32 or NTFS if you plan on going mac only? By the way I would wait for the next upgrade to Powermac, they currently suck with the Radeon 9650. Maybe see a dual core in half or a years?!? hope soo, update once a years is getting pittyfull. But if it's needed badly go for it.
 
I really don't want to go crazy waiting for the next Power Mac update. I mean at that rate I will never have a new computer... If anything I will wait for WWDC. If they say that new processors are coming out by the end of the year then maybe I would wait. But even then...sometimes estimates like those are wrong.
 
Thought I might be able to help a little here, as far as the reformatting of your drive goes...I recently bought an 80gig external drive for backup, and anticipating my switch, determined I'd need to format it in FAT32. Windows Disk Utility is the problem here, because it can only create FAT32 partitions up to 32gigs....it wants you to use NTFS. So what I did instead of dicing up my drive was used this nice little freeware app to format my disk as one big 80gig partition. Here's the link: http://www.compuapps.com/Download/swissknife/swissknife.htm It worked great for me, and hopefully it will be able to work out your problem.

Hope that helps.

--Greg
 
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