Can a mac see a fat32 drive ??

Johnny

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I am planning on getting a mac mini here really soon. But before I get one, I would like to know a mac can see a fat32 drive. The reason I ask is because I have a external drive that it fat32 I plan on hooking up to it.

Thanx for the help ...
 
Short answer: Yes. :)
Long answer: I'll leave that up to the Mac users here.
 
Yes it can, OS X can also use NTFS drives. I put my 120gb drive in me PowerMac which was formatted with XP and full of mp3's, grabbed the mp3's to another drive, then formatted the NTFS drive to the Mac OS Extended file system.
 
yep, mac can read quite an assortment of filesystems. If its in a USB or a firewire caddie then you can just plug it in and it will be mount and commonly be displayed on the desktop, all good and fine :D

I was able to mount my NTFS USB2/Firewire straight away, I didnt have to do anything to make it work
 
Thanx for the info guys. This is a usb 2.0 external hard drive ..
 
Oh some good to know info. I was thinking probably about FAT32 but had no clue about NTFS .. thats really cool. :)
 
I believe Mac fully recognizes FAT32 to both write and read, so you should be set. In terms of NTFS, I believe newer versions of OS X can read NTFS only (earlier versions of OS X don't understand NTFS at all).

Mac users can correct me if I'm wrong.

Melon
 
I never dared to try and write to my NTFS external drive :p

its probably the same code as the FreeBSD NTFS module just rewritten for darwin, so the most it can really do is read the files. I dont think anything other than Windows will ever be able to fully write NTFS because MS wont open the source to the filesystem
 
Well, it can read and write to an NTFS drive over network shares at least so I'd assume it could do the same if a NTFS drive was hooked up to it. :) And I'm using the Panther WDC preview build.
 
Weasel said:
Well, it can read and write to an NTFS drive over network shares at least so I'd assume it could do the same if a NTFS drive was hooked up to it. :) And I'm using the Panther WDC preview build.

Over the network is another thing, that is handled by the SMB layer, and the OS that connects to the server gets no info whatsoever about what file system it is, unless off course Microsoft once against changed their specs.

I just formatted a USB key to NTFS, and i was unable to write to it, but i could read the text file that was on it. I am however still using 10.3.
 
Using Knoppix w/ 2.6.x linux Kernel you can read/write NTFS though not 100% recommended. :) It will never be 100% though as MS won't allow it.

I'm thinking I want a Mac mini more and more now though. :)
 

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