Problems writing to FAT32 from Powerbook

[Sic]

i've got a 250Gb FAT32 formatted external hard drive, and everytime i try to copy something to it from my powerbook, it'll copy it, but when i got back to use it, it's converted it to a filetype called "Unix Executable File" and wont let me delete it. i've tried several ways (even plugging the drive into a windows machine to delete it, but it says the file cant be found)

is this an issue with writing to FAT32 in OSX, or something else? i'm thinking i might try formatting in the Mac format (HDFS?) and see if that makes a difference

 

[comic book guy]

is this an issue with writing to FAT32 in OSX,

Since Fat32 is an old mocrosoft format, you have to care about some things:

- Filnenames are limited are limited to i think 16 signs (or maybe 8) and you may not use some specific (space for example and definetily no dots (except for extensions)) either
- Fat32 supports only partitions to a size of 24 or 25 Gb (unless you increase the blocksize, but on my lacie<->pb connection problems occured with a partition of 80 Gb size, but with 4*20Gb Partitions it works)

i'm thinking i might try formatting in the Mac format (HDFS?) and see if that makes a difference

If you dont want to use the external drive on a windows machine, i recommend formatting in mac-journaled-filesystem. With that no problems should occur at all.

 

[Will Cheyney]

Good plan.

 

[Sic]

Fat32 supports only partitions to a size of 24 or 25 Gb (unless you increase the blocksize, but on my lacie<->pb connection problems occured with a partition of 80 Gb size, but with 4*20Gb Partitions it works)

i thought it was windows that only supported smaller partitions, but the actual file system supports partitions up to 2Gb. i read that on a few websites, so it could be wrong.

i'll be sure to watch my filenames, and special characters in filenames, if that doesnt work, i'll do the 2 partitions...going to take a while copying everything over though. would windows even be able to see the mac journaled drive?

im thinking i might just get an old 20gb laptop drive and make a little fat32 enclosure for getting things from windows, seeing as i hardly ever use it, unless i can really help it!!

 

[grapes911]

i thought it was windows that only supported smaller partitions, but the actual file system supports partitions up to 2Gb. i read that on a few websites, so it could be wrong.

Windows will read up to 2 TB partitions of FAT32 (so will OS X). Windows can't format a partition over 32 GB though (You'll need OS X for a 3rd party Windows program for this).

 

[yellow]

Also, you may want to consider putting the appropriate file extentions on the files you're copying (if you're not already).