Reading a FAT32 partition in OS X

Jan 02, '03 08:42:42AM

Contributed by: jason.flores

I recently had a hard drive go out on my Mac. I used one of the extra drives that my Windows machine did not need. When the Mac started up I was able to see the FAT32 partition of this drive. I was able to copy all of the files without any curruption (they were MP3 files and they played just fine). I am using MacOSX 10.2.3, and the drives were connected to a VST Ultra66 PCI card.

I tested it a little further and was also able to write files to the drive (from Mac) and read them on the Windows machine. Writing the files from the Mac did cause some extra files to be written other then the .DS_Store (some kind of shortcut to the files I was writing), but the files were readable from Windows.

I did some further testing. My Mac can read a FAT32 Partionion (did not test FAT16). It will not read an NTFS partition. Writing to the drive from the Mac did not currupt any of the existing data but did create extra files.

Good information for anyone switching from Windows to Mac.

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