Oct 22, '03 10:05:00AM • Contributed by: free4all
However, system administrator privileges became an issue (because I'm using university equipment) and the Mac system does not allow variable users to alter external hard drives. So I could not view the Mac side of my partition without getting a system administrator every, stinking time I wanted to save files ... needless to say, I had to find another way.
My alternative was using FAT_32, or in my case FAT_16 (my hard drive doesn't have enough space to allow FAT_32, but /f32 would work as well), OS X can read FAT formats and so I copy files effortlessly between platforms -- using this DOS method allows one big external hard drive, usable by every operating system that I can think of! Thoughts? Am I overly excited? Am I missing something about the benefits of DOS ... this "antiquated� file allocation (as opposed to NTFS, which the Mac won't read)?
This also means I won't have to wake System Administrators in the middle of the night, so that they can allow me access to my own external hard drive on the shared system to save files from some movie/audio project I'm editing.
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one (and really can't do so easily), so I'm not sure if there's something missing or not, but it seems it might help those who move drives between machines regularly. Anyone able to provide more info?]
