External Firewire drive

nemac · #1 March 29th, 2008, 08:35 PM

I have an external dirve tha I can connect iether via USB or Firewire. I partitioned the drive into two partitions. Each partition is 150 GB in size. One partition is NTFS (I still have a windows box), the other half has not been defined for the Mac yet, hence my question. How can I configure that partition so that I can use it on the Mac?

TIA

Javier

Satcomer · #2 March 29th, 2008, 08:54 PM

Mac OS X can only READ NTFS formatted drives (thanks to that Microsoft proprietary file system). You can get the free (but limited) NTFS-3G or Google's MacFuse. But who wants to bend your Mac to Windows. Format that drive back to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and get MacDrive for that Windows box.

nemac · #3 March 29th, 2008, 10:19 PM

With MacDrive, should I leave the drive with just one NTFS partition and still be able to write to it with the Mac? I want to use the external drive with TimeMachine. Will this work?

ElDiabloConCaca · #4 March 29th, 2008, 10:34 PM

Time Machine will only back up to an HFS+ formatted drive.

nemac · #5 March 30th, 2008, 11:33 AM

Ok, I have been playing with Linux for some years now and to add a new partition in Linux, you first use "fdisk" to create the new partition on any hard drive. Then you use "makefs" to create the file system on the new partition you created. Finally you add and entry into the "fstab" so that the new partition can be mounted every time you boot the box. I would assume the same would be true with Max OS X.
Am I correct in assuming this? The other thing I would need to know is the device name where the drive is mounted. In Linux I would be able to type in "dmesg" to look at messages displayed while booting up which would include the hard drives found. Is there an equivalent command in Mac OS X?

Thanks

ElDiabloConCaca · #6 March 30th, 2008, 11:52 AM

Mac OS X automatically mounts all available and readable filesystems at startup. You can use the UNIX "mount" command to force-mount filesystems.

nemac · #7 March 30th, 2008, 12:03 PM

OK, that being the case do I have to buy an external hard drive that is already formated for the Mac? or is there a command to format a new partition for the Mac?

ElDiabloConCaca · #8 March 30th, 2008, 12:31 PM

You use Disk Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities) to format a hard drive. If the drive does not show up in Disk Utility, then something else is wrong.

You can use the standard UNIX commands (fdisk) to partition the disk if you like, but Disk Utility is a much easier way of accomplishing the same thing.