Share FAT32 (and NTFS) partitions on a network

Feb 19, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: wallybear

Recently I had to share an external FAT32 formatted hard drive with another Mac, only to discover that OS X (10.4 and 10.5; I don't know if previous versions did the same) don't share non-HFS partitions.

Googling around, I found some posts here and there discussing the problem, but no workaround (apart from reformatting the drive using HFS+). In brief, I found that sharing FAT32 (and NTFS) partition is possible and not so hard to do; you just need to use Samba.

  1. In terminal, edit the file /etc/smb.conf to add the share: sudo pico /etc/smb.conf
  2. Add the following to the end of smb.conf (assuming your partition/drive is mounted on /Volumes/myfat32hd):
    [MyFatShare]
      path =/Volumes/myfat32hd
      public=yes
      writable=yes
      browseable = yes
      only guest=yes
    Then save the file (in pico, you can type Control-X, then answer Y). (You can tailor the share permissions to your liking. In this example, I created a public world-writable share).
  3. Enable Windows sharing in the Sharing System Preferences panel. This will enable and run Samba file sharing. (If Samba is already running, it checks smb.conf every minute, so you don't need to stop and restart the service to have it find the new share.)
That's all; the FAT32 partition will be available on your LAN with the name MyFatShare (or wathever you put between the square brackets). Editing of smb.conf is mandatory, as simply enabling Samba won't make the partition/drive show up. Hope this helps!

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