Come to the Volume Circus

Was origially posted at bitfever.blogspot.com on Mon Jan 05, 09:32

Oh hell!
I bought a new external Firewire Harddisk today, because the Disk in my Windows PC is always close to it's limit (as of right now I got 800Megs free space on a 97GB data partion, thats not even 1%!).
So I bought a 160GB Drive form LaClie. I plugged it into my Panther runnig PowerBook, it mounted the 160GB Volume - fine - but I wanted more.
I need to exchange files with my Windows PC and because OS X 10.3 can only read NTFS Volumes, I needed a FAT Volume for main storage. In addition to that I needed 40GB of space to store a CarbonCopyCloner image of my PowerBook (You do have a backup? Don't you?).
The problem is that the Panther DiskUtility can create HFS+ volumes (besides HFS and UFS), but it cannot create FAT volumes - Apple doesn't go that far in supporting the Windows platform (in fact FAT16/32 is the only filesystem that can be fully used by almost every OS), shame on them (yes, you can create FAT using the shell, but more on that later). So I turned to the very people who created the FAT filesystem a long time ago - Microsoft. But, after experiencing the working Plug&Play of Windows XP, I fond out, that, using MS tools you can only create FAT partions to a limit of 32GB. Yet another of those painfull artificial restrictions impsed on us by the folks in Redmond, to push a newer technology (NTFS in this case).
So I turned back to Mac OS X - with a little help from this hint I found out that you can actualy format Volumes in FAT32 via the command line.

Here is a little HowTo (because the one in the hint above is not exactly working - the author himself notes this in the comments).

1. First check the name of you local drives (do not plug in the FireWire drive) by typing

   ls /dev/rdisk?

   . Everything you see there are HDDs - those you do not want to modify. Remember those, because you'll be messing with the partion table - some mistake and you could lose data!
2. Now plug in the drive (click ignore, when the Finder promps you about the new drive) and do

   ls /dev/rdisk?

   again. The line that is new is the name of your FireWire disk. Remember this one - again one wrong number and you could erase date!
3. Now run the Disk Utility. Choose your FireWire Disk and partion it the way you would like (using the MacOS Extended filesystem) - but make shure that the volumes that you want to be FAT32 are first (on top in the Panther Disk Utility) - otherwise Widnows won't reckognize them later.
4. Let's assume your the id of your drive you found out in 2. is

   /dev/rdisk9

   Now you need to find out the names of the volumes:

   ls /dev/rdisk9*

   this will show a numbered list of the volumes in the format

   /dev/rdisk9s1
   
   /dev/rdisk9s2

   etc.
5. Now the fun part ;-) If you are totally shure that /dev/rdisk9 is the disk you want to edit you can begin formating the volumes:

   newfs_msdos -v ANY_NAME -F 32 /dev/rdisk9s1

   to format the first partion of /dev/rdisk9 in FAT32. Do not format the HFS+ volumes yet.
6. Now plug the disk into you Windows box and start the System Management Tool (right click "My Computer", "Manage") then select Disk Management. Now you'll be promted to activate the Disk for Windows, do so, but do not format anything. If everything worked you'll be able to assign Dirve letters to the FAT32 partions (note that Windows can use partions >32GB, but cannot create them!)
7. Eject and unplug the Disk and plug it back into the Mac. Now just format the remaining Volume with the Disk Utility - et voila - you got what you wanted.

I hope this helps annyone, cause I needed more than two hours to figure this out. I'm writing this while CCC is creating the backup image.

Of course I will not tkae responsibelity for anything you break or erase on your machine! Think before you do annything - you are messing with Volumes here and those pretty little things hold all your data! (How often did I warn you? ;-)