# How to format in MS-DOS format?



## guilly (Jun 25, 2004)

I have an external drive with 2 partitions. I want one of them to be Mac OS (that is easy) but I want the other one to have PC format so my PC can read files in the drive. I must do this in my Mac - not in a PC.

DiskUtilities won't allow me to make one MS-DOS partition (it lets me format the whole disk in MS-DOS format though, but that is not what I want).

Any advice? any software?

Thnx!!


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## guilly (Jun 25, 2004)

Note: it is true that - according to my needs - formating everything in MS-DOS (Macintosh Interchange) format will permit me to use the drive in both PCs and Macs; however and as long as I know, I will lose performance and I often use this drive for video post-processing.


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## Zammy-Sam (Jun 25, 2004)

what do you mean by msdos? If you want to install DOS 5 or 6 you will need fat16 and I don't think Mac Interchange format will help you.


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## guilly (Jun 25, 2004)

Uh, no no.

I want to have an external drive with 2 partitions. One of them has to be a MSDOS partition. I can do that with fdisk in Linux; how can I do that under Mac OS X?.


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## Ripcord (Jun 25, 2004)

I think Zammy's point is that there's no such thing as an "MS-DOS" partition.  MS-DOS _could_, however, read FAT12 or FAT16 partitions, the latter of which has a maximum size of 2.1GB, plus other problems.

I'm thinking it's much more likely that you want a partition that can be read by Windows, and not MS-DOS?


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## guilly (Jun 25, 2004)

Exactly that is what I mean. But in a partition, not in a whole disk (this last I can do with disk-utilities).


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## Zammy-Sam (Jun 25, 2004)

You can't splitt the drive into two partitions with DiskUtility?


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## guilly (Jun 25, 2004)

Yes I can.

But I can't make one of them to be MSDOS (fat16) like, and the other one Mac OS Plus like. At least I couldn't find out how.

By the way Zammy... do you live here, in this forum?


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## Zammy-Sam (Jun 25, 2004)

yeah, it will be complicated to get a fat16 format over your mac. I am wondering if dosbox can help you out?!

I found out, that it becomes addictive after a certain amount of posts. I simply feel weird if I miss even one post. And beside that I have not much to do on work. Waiting for my paper to be accepted..


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## guilly (Jun 25, 2004)

I have not tried with DosBOX; I just wonder if I will be able to execute a format command over a drive under this emulator, which is basically intended for gaming. However I tried with Virtual PC but since external logical drives are considered Network drives, Windows will not allow me a remote format.

OS X UNIX has the fdisk command which can be executed through the terminal. I will investigate to see where it gets me to. In the main time, I will have my USB drive fully FAT16 formatted.


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## Ripcord (Jun 25, 2004)

Out of curiosity, WHY do you need an "MS-DOS" (FAT16) partition?


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## homealone (Jun 26, 2004)

Why not use the facilities that OSX provides "Windows Sharing" that allows Windows Explorer to access files on your Mac? I have used this, it is great, but I found it difficult to connect reliably.

Perhaps one of the more experienced users could guide you in this?


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## Zammy-Sam (Jun 26, 2004)

The point of external drives is mostly to be independant from computers and network systems. You should be able to plug it to any comp and have access to your data without having a laptop to share the drive over the network. And I think this is guilly's intention here.
guilly, since you seem to work in a msdos environment as well, why don't you simply format the drive from that environment (plug the drive msdos/win95 box and use format drive)?


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## Ripcord (Jun 26, 2004)

Didn't catch the "external drive" part =)

Right, you can pretty easily just create the partition in OS X, then format the partition using Windows.  Just make sure not to format the wrong partition!


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## guilly (Jun 26, 2004)

Ripcord said:
			
		

> Out of curiosity, WHY do you need an "MS-DOS" (FAT16) partition?



Hehehe    actually I need a FAT32, the why I explain it before. However it is now becoming more and more of a challenge.


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## guilly (Jun 26, 2004)

Zammy-Sam said:
			
		

> The point of external drives is mostly to be independant from computers and network systems. You should be able to plug it to any comp and have access to your data without having a laptop to share the drive over the network. And I think this is guilly's intention here.
> guilly, since you seem to work in a msdos environment as well, why don't you simply format the drive from that environment (plug the drive msdos/win95 box and use format drive)?



Euuuuh, ok let me give answer to all these questions.

The Macintosh Interchange format (actually it is a FAT32 format) is not Macintosh optimized. It requires slightly more time to do reads and writes to disk. The Mac OS Plus format behaves faster.

My USB 2.0/Firewire drive is mainly used for video post-processing (such as converting a DVD .VOB file to DivX using mencode, for example). Disk speed is the most needed resource (w/CPU, of course). Using a FAT32 formatted disk under OS X will result in poorer performance; it is not a huge performance decrease - possibly most users won't even notice it, but I  DO care.

Hence, formating my disk in Mac OS Plus format ONLY makes this disk unreadable to Windows based computers. There's some popular software called Mac Link which will allow me to read Macintosh formated disks, but then again, an intermediate process will decrease performance. And do you want to know what I use most my external drive for in my PC? Yes, video post-processing and gaming. Two of most intensive hard-drive tasks.

Since I have 60 Gb available, I won't feel guilty to split the drive in two different chunks, with different formats, whenever they perform at their best in their respective systems.

I hope that it is clear now


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## guilly (Jun 26, 2004)

Ripcord said:
			
		

> Didn't catch the "external drive" part =)
> 
> Right, you can pretty easily just create the partition in OS X, then format the partition using Windows.  Just make sure not to format the wrong partition!



O.ô

How couldn't I think of it before? Oh, well yes, because when I posted the question there was no PC around. Thank you for the idea because I thought I was still in the same situation. Now I have my PC here with me and I use Partition Magic which is a great program to mantain partitions.


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