I have an 250gig LaCie external hard drive on it's way, which I plan to use with my Linux Desktop (Mandrake 10.1) and my 12" G4 iBook running OS X.

How would you recommend I format the hard drive?

I originally thought of using FAT 32 as it's compatible with both (and windows) - but it has a 4 gig file size limit. And the tars of my work will soon surpass that.

Can OS X read and write to ext 3? Does that have a file size limit? Can linux read and write to the OS X format (HFS+ - i think).

Has anyone been in this situation?

Cheers

Hi,

I don't know first hand, but an OS X user told me OS X won't read ext 2 or ext 3 or the ReiserFS. I don't know if Linux can read the OS X file system. Looks like mount has HFS listed as a mountable file system.


Stan

I've been looking everywhere - and there is very little info on the net. At least within my search-fu radius. I will have to try a few things, and I will update here.

Any ideas anyone?

I'm thinking I'll have 230 gig of "real" space. so I will split it to 180gig for storage in Mac format (for movies music etc). 30 gig in fat 32 for compatability and then two 10 gig partitions, for future proofing. Installing a linux boot partition or something...

Hi again,

There is an HFS+ driver for Linux. A search should bring it up.

Some of the things I read on how the OS X file system works seems to be making it difficult to write a compatible driver.

The OS X user I mentioned before said he copies files between the computers (OS X and Linux) across a 1 Gigabyte network. The discussion I read on one of the MAC forums also seemed to make one think the network solution is the best one. For the time being anyway.

Hope that helps.


Stan

I would love to do that, but I've been completely unable to "name" my mandrake 10.1 linux desktop. so there is no address for the mac to ssh into. I've also tried using it's ip address with no success.

I have the hard drive - one of the options OS X gives you is "UNIX file system" - does anyone know if this will work?

I think this link will be of some use:

http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/23085


Stan

Thanks Stan,

It seems there isn't really an easy method. I have created partions in Unix files system and FAT 32 which I will experiment with when I get a chance. But networking seems the simplest method. Which is a shame.