I wanted to use my external Firewire drive on all my systems. I found that formatting the whole thing for FAT32 was not the answer. The best solution I came across was to make two partitions, one FAT32 and the other HFS+. Windows can read FAT32, OSX and Linux can read both. Super.

The best way to do it is under OS X (10.4.2 in my case) using diskutil. My drive is 160GB, so I did a 100GB FAT32 partition and a ~60GB HFS+ partition. It’s as easy as:

diskutil partitionDisk disk2 2 MBRFormat MS-DOS FAT_VOL 100G HFS+ MAC_VOL 60G

Diskutil will figure out the change on the 60GB partition if you go over the free amount (it came to something like 55G).

You need the MBRFormat parameter if you want Windows to be able to read the FAT32 partition. If in doubt check the man page.

Using either disk under Linux 2.6.x is as easy as:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/exthd1/
mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda2 /mnt/exthd2/

You need the vfat and hfsplus modules compiled for this to work of course. Check my Linux 1394 guide for getting the disk to work under Linux.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 8:09 am and is filed under Apple, Linux, Microsoft, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.