[G4] "Finder.dat" file?

[Perry The Cynic]

Finder.dat is a file the (pre-OS X) Finder creates on MS-DOS formatted 
drives (or a few other "foreign" formats) to hold the Finder information 
that's usually stored on the Macintosh filesystem. That includes the 
desktop database and the file metainformation (creator codes etc.)

You can ignore that file. If you throw it out, Icon positions etc. will be 
reset but nothing terribly bad will happen. (You should use MS-DOS style 
file extensions then, because you'll lose creator/type information.)
You can also reformat the drive using HFS/HFS+, which will get rid of 
Finder.dat altogether, but will make the disk unreadable on Windows.

AFAIK, there's no way to tell the Finder not to (re)create this file on an 
MS-DOS partition it writes.

Cheers
  -- perry

--On Friday, March 19, 2004 8:47 PM -0500 Shannon Nugent <shannon at nuge.com> 
wrote:

> What the heck is the "Finder.dat" file for?  It keeps appearing on my zip
> disk when I save files from my mac.  Doesn't appear when I save files on
> the zip using a pc.
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Perry The Cynic                                             perry at cynic.org
To a blind optimist, an optimistic realist must seem like an Accursed Cynic.
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