[vox-tech] Formatting a disk for Macintosh using Linux

[Alex Mandel]

On 01/08/2011 09:53 PM, Nick Schmalenberger wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 08, 2011 at 09:42:52PM -0600, Chanoch (Ken) Bloom wrote:
>> I've been asked to move data from an old external hard drive to a new
>> one, and to make the new one compatible with the Macintosh. (The old
>> drive's USB connection has died, and I'm connecting to old the drive using
>> a PC card that provieds an eSATA to the drive. The recipient's 
>> Macintosh doesn't have a PC card slot, so she can't access the old
>> drive anymore. Hence, the new drive.)
>>
>> Naturally, I'm doing this data transfer using Linux. I've discovered
>> that I can format the drive as HFS+ using mkfs.hfsplus from the
>> hfsprogs package. But I need to know: do I need to do anything special
>> with the partition table? Is there a special Macintosh partition table
>> format that I need to format this disk to? If so, what tools can I use
>> to get the right format for the partition table?
>>
> Macs do have a special partition table format. Try mac-fdisk or
> parted to make the partitions. Parted supports lots of partition
> table formats and mac-fdisk is just for the mac format.
> Nick Schmalenberger
> 

I believe ita a GPT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
Which you can easily do with the standard linux disc tools. In fact you
have to use this type of table for drives over a certain amount of TB.
The only thing that might catch you is that fdisk does not work on GPT
you have to use gdisk instead.

Course with an external drive the question is should you use something
like NTFS in order for the drive to be more universally compatible with
any machine you plug into. As noted on the page I linked, not all
version of Windows support GPT so don't use that if you care about
windows compatibility. For some odd reason MAC doesn't have read/write
NTFS on by default according to some pages:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382

Enjoy,
Alex