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TICKET ARCHIVE -> External hard drive reading

love/hate - Mar 7, 2008 - 6:02 am

Hello

i have formatted my external drive to fat32, after reading that it's the only multi platform possibility.
it has now got two partitions of 28GB.
it reads on any PC but is not showing up on my mac. not in my desktop, my computer or in disk utility.
i have looked around but found no useful information.
what would you recommend doing?

could you also tell me what the name of the program is that allows Mac formatted drives to be accessed on a PC. i may eventually have the drive Mac formatted if i can get it read as i have had ongoing problems with it.

thanking you kindly for your help

Greg Burrows-Delbarry

Serenak - Mar 7, 2008 - 6:17 pm

Hello Greg

thanks for coming to macosx.com and I will try to advise/assist you as best I can.

OK let us start at the start...

FAT32 is a pretty old format and yes the Mac can read FAT32 drives (and write to them too) - I don't know how well the Mac can handle multiply partitioned FAT drives though (never tried it myself) so that might be a part of it... I also believe Windows doesn't like FAT32 drives of over 8Gb per partition - only time I tried to install Win onto a FAT32 drive over 8Gb it let me get to the part where it restarts itself and then gave me a massive "disk not readable" bomb out... I restarted the process and formatted it to NTFS and all proceeded as well as installing Windows ever does :P

Mac can read NTFS partitions but not write to them natively... but if you install MacFUSE (from here http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/) and then the ntfs-3g driver from here (http://www.ntfs-3g.org/) you can not only mount and read NTFS but write to them too (they show up as network attached/mounted drives instead of locally mounted ones on the Mac but it makes them read/writable)

I know there is a similar trick to make HFS+ drives available to Win, maybe even from the same place for all I know , but to paraphrase Mr Jobs "I prefer the flow to be in the other direction"

FAT is old and limited and sort of the "lowest common denominator" a bit like using ASCII .txt files. It is commonly used on USB flash drives and various sorts of memory cards for cameras/phones etc. because of that - but as capacities start to rise above 8Gb I would expect to see even that usage start to fade.

So if it was me (and I needed to use the drive cross platform) I think I would go for NTFS (as Win and Linux usually have no problems with that) and use the MacFUSE with ntfs-3g to make it writable to the Mac.

Of course if you want to use it mostly on the Mac then it would be more sensible to make it HFS+ if you can find a FUSE (or other solution) for that does the reverse and makes that read/write on Win or Linux.

Hope that helps