Everyone I've been talking to is confused over the nuances of "MS-DOS file system" as Apple Disk Utility seems to call it.
When you delete all partitions in Disk Utility and then select the disk , you are given the option to Erase the disk with "MS-DOS File System". As we all know, there is no such thing as MS-DOS File System. (MS-DOS and/or Windows use one or more of these: FAT, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, FAT32X, NTFS). And so I have no clue what it's really doing. I would assume it's not NTFS since MacOSX is read-only with NTFS currently. Similarly I assume it's not FAT/FAT12/FAT16 since they can't handle this big of a disk. So is it FAT32? FAT32x?
Does anyone know what is really going on? I'm guessing FAT32x. However, I've recently had a Seagate external HDD formatted that way which (in Get Info) shows up as "Macintosh PC Exchange (MS-DOS)" and works fine; yet on Linux & WindowsXP it wouldn't mount at all. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be possible to format one partition "MS-DOS" and a separate partition "HFS+" via Disk Utility.
Just trying to cut through the fog of naming conventions in hopes of defining the ultimate solution to using MacOSX to format a 250GB external HDD for use among all 3 OS's (Win/Linux/Mac).
Thanks!!
When you delete all partitions in Disk Utility and then select the disk , you are given the option to Erase the disk with "MS-DOS File System". As we all know, there is no such thing as MS-DOS File System. (MS-DOS and/or Windows use one or more of these: FAT, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, FAT32X, NTFS). And so I have no clue what it's really doing. I would assume it's not NTFS since MacOSX is read-only with NTFS currently. Similarly I assume it's not FAT/FAT12/FAT16 since they can't handle this big of a disk. So is it FAT32? FAT32x?
Does anyone know what is really going on? I'm guessing FAT32x. However, I've recently had a Seagate external HDD formatted that way which (in Get Info) shows up as "Macintosh PC Exchange (MS-DOS)" and works fine; yet on Linux & WindowsXP it wouldn't mount at all. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be possible to format one partition "MS-DOS" and a separate partition "HFS+" via Disk Utility.
Just trying to cut through the fog of naming conventions in hopes of defining the ultimate solution to using MacOSX to format a 250GB external HDD for use among all 3 OS's (Win/Linux/Mac).
Thanks!!