[X Newbies] Partitioning an External Hard Disk

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003, at 07:38 Canada/Eastern, 
swallace at chariot.net.au wrote:

> Thanks for the advice so far but how do I go about formatting for FAT 
> 32.

GUI: Disk Utility > Erase > Volume Format > MS-DOS File System.

CLI: Consult the man pages for newfs_msdos. (Usual caveats apply.)

Alternatively, if you need it, it means you work with a PC, so format 
it on a PC. If you're using a Win 2k or XP, you  have the option of 
FAT32 or NTFS. NTFS is the better file system, but, to my knowledge, OS 
X does not support NTFS at this point; NTFS is also not supported by 
Win 9x. FAT32 is probably the file system with the widest support, 
anyway.

You cannot format a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB on Win 2k/XP, but 
you can do so with fdisk in Win 98/ME.

Finally, here's a hack for using HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on the same 
physical drive.

<http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030613121738812>

I mention this for curiosity's sake. I doubt its reliability. I 
certainly would not use it and I don't recommend it.

f