[1394] Firewire Formatting Utilities

[support at fwdepot]

It is best to settle on a single FireWire driver for compatibility.

With OS 9.1 or higher you can use the generic FireWire driver that Apple
includes.  You can't partition a drive with it, only format a drive.

With OS X, Disk Utilities is the way to go.

With OS 9.0 or earlier you have to use a third party driver.

Mixing drivers and formatting drives with different utilities can cause
problems as not all third party drivers are compatible with each other and
you may experience read/write errors.

While we can't recommend any third party driver, we do recommend either
using the Apple generic driver in 9.1 (if you do not need to partition a
drive), or Disk Utility in OS X.

FireWire Depot
http://www.fwdepot.com


> Back in the SCSI days before Apple's Drive Setup recognized 3rd party
> drives, I used FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit on everything that was
> external and SCSI.
> 
> Now I have Firewire drives from half a dozen sources asking me to to
> format with the distributor's tool of choice - Lacie Silverlining,
> Charismac Anubis Utility, APS PowerTools, Intech SpeedTools - each of
> which requires installing their own Firewire Support extension to
> allow formatting.
> 
> I'd like to be able to format all of my Firewire drives with one
> utility. Since FWB is slow on answering via email, I'd like some user
> feedback on whether other utilities might work on all Firewire/USB
> devices.
> 
> DaleH
> 
> ----------
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> FAQ at <http://www.themacintoshguy.com/lists/FireWireFAQ.shtml>.
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