MacFeast Posted December 1, 2006 Share Posted December 1, 2006 I want to share one of my hard drives between the different operating systems (XP, OSX, Ubuntu). I notice there are NTFS support in all of them, but read only in X and linux. FAT32 is out of the question since it can not hold a disk image (2GB limit). It seems Ubuntu mounts HFS+ from start and XP can do it with a driver called MacDrive (are there others?). Does anyone have experience in using HFS+ for this purpose? I have memories from trying to mount NTFS filesystems in Linux a couple of years ago, resulting in breaking the entire filesystem. I obviously don't want that, so my question is thus, are the HFS+ drivers reliable? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rammjet Posted December 1, 2006 Share Posted December 1, 2006 FAT32 limit is 4 GB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table "The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GiB minus 1 B" Some people have had bad experiences with MacDrive. I haven't experienced a problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
macgirl Posted December 2, 2006 Share Posted December 2, 2006 I have probs with MacDrive Twice, so I dont like it very much, I prefer to use FAT32 and NTFS partitions, but when I'm in windows and want some data of my HFS+ partition I run VMware with a very light isntalation of Mac OS X and copy the data I need. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacFeast Posted December 3, 2006 Author Share Posted December 3, 2006 But NTFS is readonly, isn't it? Are there any more HFS+ tools out there that's more reliable? And as for FAT32, even 4GB is too little. (Besides, I think there is a limitation as to how big the partitions can be, at least Windows and PartitionMagic thinks my partition is too big). Are there any other filesystems that I can use? What is for example "Unix filesystem"? Is it something that windows and linux can be taught to understand? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rammjet Posted December 3, 2006 Share Posted December 3, 2006 Windows can be NTFS or FAT32. You can write to NTFS from within VMWare because VMWare uses Windows drivers to actually talk to the hardware when OSX tells it to. TransMac in Windows can read/write HFS+ Windows has a limit on formatting a partition as FAT32 larger than 32 GB. But the FAT32 standard has no such limit and other utilities will happily format it for you. Linux uses Ext3 and others. OSX cannot write to Ext3 but may be able to read it. An old, old plugin for OSX allows read/write for older Ext2. Creating a server and writing to it thru Samba can be done by both Windows and OSX. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bliss Posted December 3, 2006 Share Posted December 3, 2006 my files are on hfs+ and i access them with macdrive - pretty fast - just like native. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
c-prompt Posted December 4, 2006 Share Posted December 4, 2006 If you have files that are bigger than the 4gb max of fat32, just create spanning rar's or zip's to circumvent the limit. Everything else will be fine as long as you're just using FAT32 for data storage, as Windows runs much faster on NTFS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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