External Hard Drive Partitions

[Tweedman]

I picked up a 160 gig external hard drive and I'm trying to get my music and such on there from my iBook to make them accessible on my Slack box. Does anyone know what kind of partition I can use that both can recognize? A friend suggested Fat32 but that wasn't working for me, I tried using partiton magic, fdisk and the mac partition tool to no avail. Hopefully someone here can help. Thanks!

[devils casper]

i would suggest you FAT32 too. Linux supports FAT32 read/write access.
download GParted LiveCD and try to partition through it. why Partition Magic and fdisk are not working? could explain a bit more?
FAT32 filesystem has only one drawback. FAT32 doesn't support more than 4GB filesize.

[Tweedman]

I'm still having problems, I'll tell you what I've done so far because i'm a noob and the issue is probably in my process. I did a Fat32 partition on the external drive using the mac partition tool, then plugged the drive into my Slack box.
Then i did tail /var/log/messages to check the device.
I did fdisk /dev/sde then hit P to check the partition table.
My device boot was /dev/sde1
I had already done mkfs.ext3 /dev/sde1 from trying to do this earlier.
I added /dev/sde1 /mnt/usbdrive auto user,noauto 0 0 to /etc/fstab
mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
mount /mnt/usbdrive
Still can't transfer files from my mac to my box, I have no clue why.

[devils casper]

post the output of 'fdisk -l' command.

[Tweedman]

Ok I figured out my problem, I was mounting it wrong.. was supposed to be mount -t vfat.
Thanks for looking out though

[devils casper]

I had already done mkfs.ext3 /dev/sde1 from trying to do this earlier.

i thought you have formated disk in ext3 format only.

anyways, Well Done.