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

[Nick Schmalenberger]

On Sat, Jan 08, 2011 at 10:56:25PM -0800, Alex Mandel wrote:
> 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
>
Macs with openfirmware and maybe before that, i'm not sure, used
a different kind of partition table also. I think once apple
started using EFI they started to use GPT also. So if the mac is
older than that then its the mac partition table.