On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 09:12:53AM -0500, Brian Rose wrote:
> 
> I recently bought a 160GB drive to put into my external enclosure to
> use as a portable drive. My goal is to develop a portable hard drive
> that can be used on my Windows and NetBSD machines.
>
> The problem is that Windows XP will not format a drive larger than
> 32GB as FAT32. I could format it as NTFS, but then other computers
> writing to the disk run a small, but not insignificant, chance of
> trashing the system (that is to say I have seen it happen). I could
> format it as FAT32 in NetBSD, but then the cluster size is rather
> large and inefficient (32k I believe). So something better than FAT32
> should be used.
>
> So my bright idea is to format it using the Macintosh file system and
> use the MacDrive driver that comes with XPlay (used for accesing the
> iPod disk in windows) to access it. My guess is that this filesystem
> will be more efficient. Is this a correct assumption?

Won't you then you get the whole resource fork/data fork issues you have
with Mac filesytems and files.

> Also, has anybody done any other tricks to get a large, efficient file
> system onto a disk that is readable in WindowsXP? Perhaps someone has
> written a Windows driver for ext2,3 or ffs?

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

The lowest common denominator is going to be the FAT32 solution, but
yeah, you're going to lose a lot in fs overhead.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson@bl.org