connecting to an external freecom hard drive

Hi Farv,
the hd is probably NTFS formatted. Change this to FAT32 and everything should be fine.
-Petra

Hi Farv,
I missed the fact that you are running Jaguar. Jaguar won't see FAT32 formatted drives larger than 128GB. So, what can you do? First, you could partition the drive with one HFS+ and one NTFS partition. Or, you could use NTFS and connect the firewire drive to your Windows PC and share it over the network with your Mac. As long as the disk is not locally connected to your iBook it will read and write to a NTFS formated volume just fine.
-Petra

Hi Farv,
First let me stress, that I haven't tried this myself. I found this procedure in a german mac forum and people reported that it worked for them. The way to go is to partition the drive on the Mac, and to create one HFS+ partition (that is the OS X file system) and one FAT32 partition for Windows. Then you connect it to your Windows pc and convert the FAT32 partition to NTFS (Windows XP preferred format). You will need to use the terminal to do so.

Before you type anything, be sure to read the full text.

To create one FAT32 partition with 30GB capacity named "WIN" and one HFS+ partition with 20GB capacity named "MAC", you would type the following into the terminal:

diskutil partitionDisk disk1 2 MBRFormat MS-DOS WIN 30G HFS+ MAC 20G

and hit return

The volume number disk1 has to be replaced by the one used by your Mac.To find the right number type the following in the terminal, first with your external hd disconnected, and then with your external drive connected:

ls -la /dev/rdisk?

Without your external volume you will get something like this:

PowerBook:~ ebbi$ ls -al /dev/rdisk?
crw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 0 28 Sep 20:14 /dev/rdisk0

With your external drive connected it will look similiar to this:

PowerBook:~ ebbi$ ls -al /dev/rdisk?
crw-r----- 1 root operator 14, 0 28 Sep 20:14 /dev/rdisk0
crw-r----- 1 ebbi operator 14, 4 28 Sep 20:48 /dev/rdisk1


In short, the new number you get, is the right number to use.

Beware: If you use the wrong number, eg. the drive number representing your internal HD, you will completely erase it and loose all your data.

When the formatting has run its course, disconnect the drive and connect it to your windows machine and convert the FAT32 partition named "WIN" to NTFS.

-Petra

Dual G5 1.8, Alu PowerBooks Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Hi Farv,
Dr Smoke explains three more options for sharing an external drive between Windows and OS X. In short, one is to format the whole drive as FAT32 with all it's limitations, the second is to format the drive in MacOS extended (aka. HFS+) and to use a special software on the PC to access that drive, and the third is to share the drive over the network. The last one might be of interest to you, as he gives a lot of links that explain how to propperly set up such a network.
-Petra