right on, so everything is alright now and already downloading some new stuff, thanks a lot for all the help guys, that was really DIY!

It's not so hard working on computers, eh?

While you were doing that, I was formatting, partitioning, setting the mount-point and assigning user permissions on my new (external) hard drive. My initial goal was to set it up with a FAT32 filesystem so it could be understood by Windows boxes and Macs as well as Linux.

For some reason, the program I was using (qtparted) was determinedly failing at creating a FAT32 partition. After about 2 hours of headaches and dicking around with various formatting programs, I finally just said "fuggit" and formatted it as an ext3 (Linux) partition.

FAT32 sucks anyway. Maximum file size of 4GB. Puh-leeze. If I wanted to save a DVD ISO or something, I'd have to use a file splitter or archive program to split it up into chunks. Fuck that.

Well it turns out that all the trouble I had was due to the fact that the drive itself is hosed. It keeps stalling whenever I try to write to it. At least it didn't have any valuable information on it yet. It was an OEM drive I picked up several months ago in a clearance sale for about 30 bucks, so it's not a huge loss.

Just goes to show, don't skimp on hard drives or other long-term storage options (like CDRs or DVDRs). Buy good quality stuff that you can be confident in. I should have tested this hard drive out immediately after purchasing it. Now I've got to go out and buy a new one. Damn.

i need to buy a new external HD for my mac soon...i need to move all of my mp3's and other files off of the main drive...

Colonel Panic wrote:... I was formatting, partitioning, setting the mount-point and assigning user permissions on my new (external) hard drive. My initial goal was to set it up with a FAT32 filesystem so it could be understood by Windows boxes and Macs as well as Linux.

I have not found such a thing for HFS (Mac), but you can now read an write to Ext2 and Ext3 (Linux) filesystems from Windows.

LINK

I've been using EXT2Fds for a few months now and it works very well - no issues with corrupted data at all. EXT2IFS has a few more options a user can take advantage of, but it wasn't working well for me with Vista. I used it for several months previously with XP, without issue.

I installed that program on my laptop about a year ago and it caused extreme instability in XP. The machine would just suddenly shut off for no apparent reason. No shutdown process, no nothing. The computer would just turn itself off spontaneously. It was aggravating, to say the least.

I originally thought the machine was turning off due to processor overheating because of dust in the fans. Even after taking the machine apart, cleaning out all dust, removing the processor and applying fresh heat sink compound, then reassembling, it still had the same problem whenever I ran Windows. Then I noticed that it never happened when I booted into Linux. Having identified the problem as Windows-related, I reinstalled XP and it's been working fine ever since.

About a month ago I was talking with this guy in the #kubuntu IRC channel and he called Ext2IFS a "kludge" and said it can cause severe system instability due to the way it hooks into the XP kernel. I don't know anything about this guy's credentials, but what he said sure seems consistent with my experience.

I have seen some commercial programs that offer the same functionality, so I may try out one of those, though I feel that paying extra for functionality that ought to be native to all OSs in this day and age is pretty disgusting.

One situation that these kinds of programs won't help with is when I want to bring my external HDD to somebody else's computer. I certainly don't want to have to install some software on a friend's machine that makes deep and irreversible changes to their OS and maybe even cause trouble for them, just to share some data.