File Format for Server HD for all OS's

[ddeadserious]

I've got a Powermac G4. It's effectively just my home server pretty much. It is hooked up my Seagate Freeagent FW400 external hard drive.

It shares this very nicely with other Macs on my network.

But I'd also like to be able to share the files(movies, music, and software archives) with the 3 or 4 PCs that are also on my network.

Right now, it's formatted for Mac, HFS if I remember correctly.

So what format can I use that I can read and write to under OS X, but also under Windows?

I had it FAT32, and that worked well, until A. My other Mac couldn't see it over the network, and B. I tried putting a 5GB file on it.

So is this possible without 3rd party utilities? I have Macdrive installed on XP on my Bootcamp partition, but it won't "map network drive" - I take it Macdrive doesn't work for network drives.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

 

[ChrisA]

The computers on your network should not be able to "see" what kind of file system is used on the shared drive. They only see the over the wire network protocol which I assume is SMB.

 

[ddeadserious]

They only see the over the wire network protocol which I assume is SMB.

My knowledge of networking is not advanced enough to really know what this means.

The point is that my Windows systems cannot even see the Mac formatted network drive, just as my Boot Camp partition can't see the Mac partition without 3rd party software.

 

[PeterNem]

The point the previous poster made was that over a network the computers talk to each other rather than directly to the storage, so the file format of a drive does not matter as long as the server itself can read and write to it.

Your client machine talks to the server and in turn the server talks to the disk - it doesn't matter if the disks are in a format the client do not understand.

A windows machine will be able to read and write to an HFS volume fine over a network.

 

[belvdr]

It sounds like the OP is disconnecting the hard drive from the server, and then reconnecting it directly to other machines. If that's the case, I believe FAT32 is your only option.

If it is consistently connected to your server, and you share it over the network (NFS, SMB, etc), then the filesystem doesn't mattery, as the only system ever directly accessing the storage is your server.

 

[ddeadserious]

Okay, I suppose I used the term server incorrectly.

It's just my Powermac G4, no server software installed or anything. I just have it all set up to share over the network.

I do disconnect the drive periodically, it has a partition that is my Time Machine back up for my MBP, and I do take it to my friends sometimes to share larger files.

It seems FAT32 is my only option, unfortunately.

Thanks guys.