Some Odd Problems With My New HD -- Questions Included!

[bobber205]

I just got my new 320 gig HD from newegg set up today. Yay!

However, I was planning on booting from it via firewire. (I was told that my intel mac could boot off of usb 2.0 also). Well, the cords in the box are iffy. The USB one is working right now but I don't seem to be able to use the firewire. Look at the pics below. WTF? Why is one end so little. I have to plug the regular looking firewire port into the back of the machine. It doesn't one for the "little" one and neither, obviously, does my macbook.

Should I just tough it out with USB? Will it be suffiecient for storage/booting?

One more question. I want to give 80 gigs to Windows Vista and the rest as storage that preferably a windows computer could access on the network.
How should I format my drive to be able to do that?

Sorry for the pics not being too awful clear.

 

[mac-convert]

I don't know about anyone else, but that is SO out of focus, I have no idea what I am looking at. Some better pics maybe?

And what does this mean? => It doesn't one for the "little" one and neither, obviously, does my macbook.

 

[fivetoadsloth]

I think you have a firewire 800 cable, i cant for sure from the picture, but if it is the macbook doesnt have it. Without this it will be very slow, and i think windows wont even like it not being a firewire drive. maybe be wrong though... Sorry.

 

[Angrist]

It's probably a 4 pin connector on one end, it's smaller and squarer than the other end.
For some retarded reason peecees use the 4 pin firewire variant that does NOT carry power. Every firewire (400) Mac uses the full 6 pin connector.

So... you'll need to get a 6-pin to 6-pin cable and things should be fine.

 

[bobber205]

It's probably a 4 pin connector on one end, it's smaller and squarer than the other end.
For some retarded reason peecees use the 4 pin firewire variant that does NOT carry power. Every firewire (400) Mac uses the full 6 pin connector.

So... you'll need to get a 6-pin to 6-pin cable and things should be fine.

Weird. I'll just buy one then.

BTW how should I format the drive for windows vista / storage?

 

[Blubbert]

BTW how should I format the drive for windows vista / storage?

Well, Vista should still use NTFS, so that would be the best way to go with that. However, Macs cannot write on NTFS, just read, so if you want to share your storage between OSX and Vista, you are going to need a FAT32 partition, which cannot have files bigger than 4gb. If your storage is for Mac only, just choose the HSF+ with Journaling.

 

[janey]

Well, Vista should still use NTFS, so that would be the best way to go with that. However, Macs cannot write on NTFS...

you can use macfuse on the mac to get the same level of ntfs read/write support that linux currently has: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ (i <3 amit singh soo soo soooo much)
alternatively you can use macdrive on the windows (actually i dunno if it works with vista) to have hfs+ read/write in windows.
and to top that off, you could either go buy a 6-pin to 6-pin cable, or get a 4-pin to 6-pin adapter for your drive.

on a sidenote...@bobber205..that thinking in java book OWNS

 

[bobber205]

Cool. I checked "Master Boot Volume" as my Options option in Disk Utility.

So should make both the 80 gig and leftover gigs both NTFS and use Macfuse to be able to read to both larger partition? (storage one).
Will it affect the reading speed much?