This is kind of a simultaneous vent session and cry for help. I will gladly accept input from anyone who has some advice. I just asked one person via email and hope he’s got a good answer. If so, I’ll follow up here.
Ok, for any new readers, let’s preface this with some facts:
- I’m a geek
- I have a lot of computers
- I grew up on MS Windows
- My relationship with windows ends with XP
- I tried converting to Ubuntu a couple times, but FAIL
- I tried converting to Mac a few times, and finally SUCCEEDED
- Citrix (to connect to a client) works best on XP
- I need to keep my XP machine, but I prever my Mac
Ok, there’s your background. Now here’s my dilemma. I have three external USB drives, and I need to organize the files on the lot of them. It would be INFINITELY convenient if I could format them each as one partition that worked with both XP and MacOS. I have 10.5 Leopard if that’s relevant. All the drives are formatted as NTFS right now, but I can shuttle files around enough to clear them and reformat them one at a time. What file system should I use, though?
- NTFS is perfect for XP, but Mac can only read it. I need read/write.
- Fat32 works great for both systems, but I’m not breaking my 500GB drive into 15 32GB partitions.
- Mac’s default is, what, HFS+? XP can’t read that natively.
The fourth option, the one I need, is either a file system that works with both operating systems, or a utility for one that allows it to read the others’.
Suggestions?
fengshui | 22-May-08 at 9:38 pm | Permalink
The simplest way is to use FAT32. Windows XP will not create a FAT32 volume larger than 32GB for performance reasons (they want you to use NTFS), but Windows will happily work with large FAT32 volumes. You just need to create the partition in Linux or OSX. (You can use a Linux liveCD to create the partition, if OS X Disk Utility won’t do it)
Alternately, if you want to go with NTFS, the Linux NTFS-3G read/write driver now works on OSX as well: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/