Mac, XP and Fat32

Well my external USB2/Firewire drive arrived as promised. I plugged it into my windows XP box and it failed to show up. Some investigation revealed it was trying to show up as a drive I already had mapped. No worries I remapped it to r: drive. Easy.

A small note in the manual caught my attention here. It informed me if I wanted to use it on a Mac and a PC it would need to be reformatted as a FAT32 file system. Easy I thought. Selected it, right clicked, chose Format - away we go. But windows XP didn't offer me a FAT32 selection, just NTFS (which Mac can't read, or perhaps can read but can't write, I'm not quite sure).

Some hours, and several goggle searches later, this is what I had discovered. I could format FAT32 in XP via the DOS window but it would limit the drive to 32gb. Same for Windows 2000. They can read FAT32 drives over 32gb, just can't format them. Windows 98 can format happily my full 120gb drive. No windows 98 machine? No problem, just download a Win98SE (and it has to be second edition) boot disk and go from DOS. DOS not picking up your USB drive? Dismantle it, open up your computer, unplug your internal Hard drive and plug the one out of the portable in - away you go! Easy.

I did all this and I now have a nice 120gb that can be easily read and written to by Mac and Windows machines. The problem with this is FAT32 has a maximum individual file size of 4gb. As I intend to use the drive for some video editing this may be a problem. There is however a possible solution. While normally the Mac file system, HFS+, doesn't like sharing with FAT32 you can convince it to. The article linked above goes through it in more detail than I can understand but put simply you divide the drive into two partitions using a windows machine and use a Mac to put HFS+ file system onto one of those partitions. It works but no one seems confident that it is an entirely safe and stable solution.

Mac's and PC's don't really like each other.