Sharing a file system among Linux, Mac OS, and Windows

When you’re dual-booting (or triple-booting, or …), or when you’re sharing a portable USB2/Firewire hard drive among different boxes, all of a sudden, file systems become important. NTFS isn’t supported by Mac OS, to my knowledge, and while you can read it under Linux, writing is still iffy. Fat32 is supported by everyone, but that’s kind of a sucky filesystem. So what can you use?

Ext2 isn’t a bad choice, since it’s supported under Mac OS X, Linux (duh), and even Windows, to some degree.

Mac OS X - Ext2fsx: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/
Windows - Explore2fs: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

Mac OS X & Linux can read & write Ext2; Windows, however, can only read. However, with all OS’s you get support for large partitions and large file sizes, which is great. Too bad you don’t get journaling …

View Tags

When you’re dual-booting (or triple-booting, or …), or when you’re sharing a portable USB2/Firewire hard drive...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

3 Comments

Filter by:

C.K. Sample, III

Hey, Scott, I've been playing around with Ext2 on my Mac, as I purchased a Linksys NSLU2 Network Device, and Ext2 is the default format it uses for the attached drives. Just wanted to add a note that transferring extremely large amounts of data between OS X and Ext2 is still a little buggy. I think once you tip the 2GB scale it starts freaking out (if memory serves me correctly; I haven't dealt with this since I originally copied all my music over to one of the drives in question). Cheers, C.K.

March 01 2005 at 11:09 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply