Hey all,

Okay, here's my situation. I am currently working between Fedora 7 (main computer) and Windows XP (for school requirements). However, I am about to purchase a MacBook Pro. I currently have a large amount of music that has grown beyond the 80GB Maxtor HDD that I purchased several years ago. I recently bought a 500GB Seagate Free Agent drive and, using Fedora, re-formated the stock NTFS to ext3. When the HDD is connected to the Linux system, it works perfectly. However, my Windows computer does not recognize the drive at all, even after installing the ext3 read-write software which would recognize the 80GB HDD also in ext3. After talking with one of my buddies, he stated that even with the ext3 read-write software, Windows will not recognize a drive over 500GB that is not NTFS. My first question is whether or not this is true.

Secondly, because I am about to purchase a Mac, what file system would you recommend that would be most compatible between Linux/mac/windows? One of my biggest concerns, aside from data loss/corruption, is the portability between my friends computers and I as we like to swap out and trade music.

Thank you for any input you can offer!

3rdKey

For disk file systems, you're going to find it pretty hard and I would strongly urge you to consider a network file system. If you have a system that can run as a file server, take a look at FreeNAS (www.freenas.org). Otherwise, you can get small "file server in a box" devices for a couple hundred bucks or something fancy like the InfrantReady NAS NV+ for about a thousand (http://www.infrant.com/products/prod...dyNAS%20NVPlus).

For large shared file systems, I wouldn't bother with trying to share a local disk (USB or otherwise). Most NAS boxes will serve files out SMB or NFS.

Windows not recognizing the drive seems to indicate a hardware rather than a software issue. Even with a file system that it can't read, it will still recognize the drive - it just won't be able to read/write from/to the file system(s).

I don't know whether there are any limits to the ext3 driver for windows. Maybe 500GB really is the limit. But then I'm sure that you can split the drive up into two or three or maybe more partitions.