Winxp shows AEBS HFS+mounted disk as Fat32

[Ebakker]

I just got a new harddisk and have been trying to get it functioning properly today, the problem is the following:

Drive is partitioned in HFS+ using macdrive7 (installed on my system). It does show up in windows very easily thanks to the airport utility, however, it shows the file system as being fat32.

I formatted the disk in HFS+ on purpose to be able to storage large files in the network drive, so this is a problem.

Also, the disks show empty, although i already put some files on the disk for testing purposes, this was done when the drive was connected directly via usb.

Does anyone know how i can get windows to show the drives as HFS+?

 

[iShater]

Doesn't your windows machine see the drive through AEBS as a network based drive?

 

[Ebakker]

Yes it does, but that doesn't change anything to the fact that is shows as a fat32 formatted network drive. (thus, it does not accept any file larger than 3,6gb or something like that)

 

[iShater]

Yes it does, but that doesn't change anything to the fact that is shows as a fat32 formatted network drive. (thus, it does not accept any file larger than 3,6gb or something like that)

Actually, when drives show up as network drives it doesn't really care about the low-level format of the drive.

Best way to try is to copy a 4GB file to it and see if it fails.

 

[Ebakker]

Hmm, oke, zipping some files now to check that.

Weird thing is though, i did place some files on the disk (for a total of 10gb) and this is visible in the difference in free space aka, no files are visible but there is a difference between total space and free space.

If i would be able to copy large files to this disk it would make me happier, but the problem isn't solved just yet ...

 

[iShater]

status update?

 

[Ebakker]

Update; study was demanding some time...

Status: solved.

Here is how the mechanism works:
The disks are shown as being FAT32, however this is just an expression of windows being incapable of recognizing HFS+ partitions and perhaps the fact that the AEBS presents the disks as network mapped drives.

The reason that I couldn't see the files I added through USB is that the airport makes a map called "shared" on the disks in which everything is stored. (you cannot see this until you connect the hdd through USB)

So, end of story is: I am able to read and write from either windows or macosx based computers. (which is good because next month i will be getting my mbp15... finally!)

Thanks for the help!

 

[skorpien]

Just an FYI, and perhaps a bit too late, but the format of the drive has nothing to do with how it's shared over the network. Mac computers connect to the drive via AFP while Windows machines connect via SMB. The base station is what handles the connection, and the Windows machines show the drive as FAT32. As you've found out, there are no filesize restrictions with network drives as there are with traditional FAT32 drives. Great way to share HFS+ drives between multi platform systems IMO (barring you don't need the speed of FireWire/USB).