Format and Partition Scheme for an External Hard Drive

[erinsaurus87]

Ive never partitioned a hard drive before and I thought it would be a good idea to partition my new external hard drive into three partitions: one for my time machine backups from my Mac, one to hold files I might want to move somewhere from my Mac, and one to use with my kubuntu linux machine. Which format should I use for the linux partition? MS-DOS (FAT)? ExFat? Free Space? The other format options seem to be windows or mac specific. The other thing I dont know about is which partition scheme to use. Apple Partition Map, GUID, and Master Boot Record are my options.

Thanks for any help,

Erin

[dibl]

Re: Format and Partition Scheme for an External Hard Drive

Ive never partitioned a hard drive before

Take a look at #5 in the FAQs link in my signature. There is lots of guidance in there on the subject of partitioning.

wrt the need for 3 different filesystems, I'm not familiar with what your Mac uses -- is it not a Unix filesystem like ext3 or ext4? Windows uses NTFS, and Linux will be happy with ext4.

[Teunis]

Re: Format and Partition Scheme for an External Hard Drive

As it's an external drive it will probably travel.
You talk about your Mac so I assume you don't use anything like Windows.
But I would still use ext3 for the Linux partition as there are pretty good windows drivers for it.
Ext4 is still not very well supported on Windows.

[erinsaurus87]

Re: Format and Partition Scheme for an External Hard Drive

im confused when you guys say ext3 because thats not an option given to me for the format by the Mac OS X disk utility im using to partition the hard drive...

[oshunluvr]

Re: Format and Partition Scheme for an External Hard Drive

im confused when you guys say ext3 because thats not an option given to me for the format by the Mac OS X disk utility im using to partition the hard drive...

I wouldn't use the mac utility to create partitions for the other OS's.