OSX on a FAT32 drive??? Crazyness

arri

arri

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hi,

a friend came to me with her brandnew macbook.
she'd done something (really) studip, still don't know exactly what, but it made pretty much her whole home-dir dissapear. she asked me to help and see if we could recover some stuff.

trying to mount the drive on my powerbook, the drive was reported as FAT32 formatted..
i haven't got much experience with intel-macs yet, but somethings tells me that the OSX boot partition shouldn't be FAT32.
i couldn't find anything online about osx on a fat32 drive, so i guess i'm right..

still, eventhough it supposedly is a fat32 drive, OSX is booting from it. i'm a bit lost here.

i start to believe the drive is falsly reported as fat32, but can anyone say something sensible about this?


thanks
arri
 
OS X will read a FAT 32 drive. When I did BootCamp on my new MacPro and on the Mini I purchaced for my family I went and made a FAT 32 partition on both when I installed XP so I would be able to access it from OS X. So yes it is possible for it to read. I've also had a external drive that was FAT 32 which I installed OS X on and was able to boot from. As wierd as it seems it is possible.
 
well, i believe os9 could already read/write fat32 disks (floppies and usb memory sticks are often fat32...)

but as an osx bootpartition?
doesn't seem right..
 
as is mentioned, it may well be possible, if not the optimal way to do things. OSX takes advantage of many HFS+ attributes, and indeed, things like spotlight won't even work on anything but HFS+. also, the fact that OSX doesn't really get fragmented owes a lot to HFS+, you may find a lot of file system errors as a result of not using HFS+. i would suggest a Clean Install of OSX on a formatted HFS+ volume.
 
thanks Burns and Roto,

i did indeed do a clean install, after reformatting the drive to HFS+ shortly after my initial post.

probably Burns' last post is the best explaination for osx to work more/less but in the end fail on several points. still i can't find anything related on the internet. probably noone has tried this (or is so stupid to even thikn of it)..

thanks.
a
 
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