Forget the whole “Mac or PC” thing. Your household does both. Or maybe you’re nerdy (like me) and run Linux alongside the other two. You have a grand plan of using an external hard drive (or flash drive) to transfer/backup files between all of them. Is that even possible? The answer is “yes”, and it doesn’t even depend on what hard/flash drive you have. Most drives come pre-formatted in a certain file system. Many folks don’t realize that *any* drive can be reformatted in *any* format you choose. Why not choose one that supports multiple OSes natively? Survey of Native OS Support A quick survey of Wikipedia’s reveals that only a small number of file systems have native support for Windows, OS X, *and* Linux. Really, only two: • • Let’s take a deeper look at these two. UDF The following table puts various differences between FAT32 and UDF side-by-side. Most of the data came (as retrieved on 2015-Feb-20): There are two others that are worth mentioning, along with why they didn’t quite make the cut: • – In OS X, the kernel only has partial read-only support. Read/write support can be gained with third-party NTFS-3G. ![]() ![]() But if you try to use an external hard drive that's been formatted for Mac OS, you'll find. For transferring data between computers or as additional backup space. I want to use seagate external hard drive on my mac but it says 'Windows NT File System (NTFS)' solved Multiple Laptop Backups on ONE external drive; I am using Windows 7 backup onto Seagate. • – In Linux, support requires third party driver. UDF Details In many regards, UDF seems to be superior to FAT. (This isn’t surprising, as UDF was designed to be a good open successor of FAT.) Here is a more full listing of UDF’s: • UDF is an open standard. • The design and evolution of UDF keeps compatibility in mind. • UDF natively supports many modern file systems features: • Large partition size (maximum 2 TiB with 512 B block size, or 16 TiB with 4 KiB block size) • 64-bit file size • Extended attributes (e.g., named streams, or forks) without size limitation • Long file names (maximum 255 bytes, any character can appear in the name) • Unicode encoding of file names • Sparse file • Hard links • Symbolic links • Metadata checksum • UDF defines how different platforms interact with each other. For example, it defines how to store Mac Finder Info and Resource Fork, NTFS ACL, UNIX ACL, OS/2 EA, etc. It also requires platforms to preserve the information that they don’t understand. • UDF is a truly universal file system. It can be used on all kinds of optical media, including read only (CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, BD-ROM (Blu-ray Disc Read-Only)), write once (CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, BD-R), rewritable (CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, CD-MRW, DVD+MRW, BD-RE), and of course block device (hard drives). Even write-once media appears as a big overwritable floppy under UDF. OS Support UDF offers moderately wide support across many operating systems. See for current data, or for a good summary. Download game batman the dark knight rises android free. Formatting UDF A few different (OS-specific) tools exist for formatting UDF: • Linux – • OS X – • Windows – However, each of these methods comes with deficiencies: • Using Windows’ format method means that the resultant UDF drive cannot be recognized on OS X (at least as of OS X 10.10). • Merely using newfs_udf on OS X means that the resultant UDF hard drive cannot be recognized on Windows (at least as of Windows 7). Tamil melody remix songs free download 123musiq. • Merely using mkudffs on Linux means that the resultant UDF hard drive cannot be recognized on Windows (at least as of Windows 7). Why can’t Windows recognize properly formatted UDF hard drives? A Fake Partition Table to Fake Out Windows As mentioned by Pieter, Windows does not support hard disks without a partition table. This is strange because Windows does not apply the same limitation to flash drives. To make matters worse, OS X only uses UDF disks that utilize the full disk (not just a partition). The solution, as suggested by Pieter, is to place a fake partition table (via ) in the first block of the drive, which lists a single entire-disk partition. This works because UDF (perhaps intentionally) doesn’t utilize the first block.
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