Cross-platform interoperability
July 13, 2007 9:44 am freesoftware, GeneralMacintosh Operating System 10.3.x or earlier will only recognize FAT32 partitions that are smaller than 128-gigabytes. Multiple FAT32 partitions smaller than 128-gigabytes will need to be created in order for Macintosh Operating System 10.3.x or earlier to recognize the partitions.
Following on from my previous call for help on back-ups, anyone know of a filesystem I can use which is supported read-write by Linux, Windows and Mac OS X 10.3, and which will give me access to all of a 500GB disk?
Otherwise, out comes the partition editor…
July 13th, 2007 at 10:08 am
I believe there are ext2 drivers for Windows as well as for MacOSX.
July 13th, 2007 at 10:12 am
I think you only have two options:
1) multiple FAT32 partitions.
2) NTFS with ntfs-3g. “The NTFS-3G driver is an open source, freely available read/write NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, and Haiku.”
July 13th, 2007 at 10:21 am
You can also make a little FAT32 partition, with ext2 drivers for Windows ( http://www.fs-driver.org/ ) and Mac OS X ( http://ext2fsx.sourceforge.net/ ), and a big ext3 partition…
July 13th, 2007 at 10:33 am
sucks, i once thought UDF might be an option, but its not quite supported in the end, though all oses claim the support UDF read/write
July 13th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I think there are ext2 drivers for both Windows and OS X.
Mac: http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-88563.html
Windows: http://www.fs-driver.org/
July 13th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Ext3 can be read by windows and os x with open source drivers…
OS X leopard will handle ZFS, but I don’t think windows will.
ntfs-3g is very slow, cause it’s using fuse under linux (and OS X as well with macfuse), so not suitable for backups.
I’m following the comments as I plan to buy an external HDD and have exactly the same concerns 🙂
July 13th, 2007 at 10:44 am
ext2? 🙂
Use http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ for Mac
and http://www.fs-driver.org/ for Windows
July 13th, 2007 at 10:55 am
ext2/3 ? Available as hacks for OS X and Windows.
July 13th, 2007 at 10:55 am
I still can’t undestand why this problem hasn’t been solved with something better than fat. it’s 2007 right?
July 13th, 2007 at 11:20 am
I was going to suggest Option (2). It’s evil enough that it might just work. ntfsprogs can provide a mkfs.ntfs if you need it.
July 13th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Upgrade to Tiger?
July 13th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Tiger update is certainly worth it all things considered.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
I use the ext2 drivers. They work just fine with ext3, except they don’t support journaling. The problems I’ve had with them are the following:
Windows does not understand that linux has case-sensitive names, so if you have two folders in the same directory with different cases, weird things happen.
If you shutdown improperly in linux and the journals have content, the filesystem will not be recognized in windows. Reboot back into linux, let the journals be written to disk, and then boot back into windows.
Other than that it seems the best option. No one really wants to use fat32, and ntfs is (imnsho) unstable, and a bad option for linux.