I got an external USB/Firewire drive, the idea being to use it as a backup for
my PowerBook and Linux box. It didn't work on the first try: the mac can't
read ext2fs partitions, and the Linux box didn't recognize the disk when I
plugged it in.
I learned several things. First, there is a tool for Mac OS X that will read
ext2fs disks, it's called ext2sfx. Unfortunately, it
doesn't work with Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"), which is what my PowerBook is
running.
Second, I learned that Linux can in fact read HFS+ disks. But there are a few
tricks. First, the disk has to be formatted as "not case-sensitive". To format
the disk in that way, open the 'Disk Utility' program on your Mac OS X
machine, click on the external disk, then "erase", then "Mac OS Extended
(journaled)" for the volume format. Click erase to wipe the drive and put the
HFS+ filesystem on it. The screenshot below illustrates this process.
The next trick is that the disk did not show up as an icon on my Linux desktop
when I plugged it in. This is only a limitation of the default configuration,
however, because Linux can in fact read that disk perfectly. You have to
mount it manually the first time, and then the icon will show up on the
desktop the way you expect it to.
To mount the disk I had to use the following command line:
mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda10 /mnt/external_disk
Make sure that you created the /mnt/external_disk directory first. Depending
on your particular setup, it's possible that you have to use a different
number instead of "sda10" (for example "sda9" or "sda11"). That number will
not change for a given disk though, so once you find the
correct settings you're set. Add them to /etc/fstab: the icon will show up
from then on when you plug in the disk.
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