[ale] Disk Format Question - Best choice for 500 Gig?

[preston.lists at gmail.com (Preston Boyington)]

Thompson Freeman wrote:
<snipped>
> I've got a 500 Gig hard disk...I  
> expect the best format for the hard disk is a fat/msdos  
> type system, and I think I want the fat32 type.
> 

most likely you will wind up with FAT32.  it is supported by virtually
all major operating systems (although purists will probably need a
kernel patch).  also it will handle your disk size without a problem.

that said, i have had (on a couple of occasions) my FAT32 partition to
go nuts when connected to various WinXP machines.  quite literally i had
to format the partition in order to use it again.  nothing easily
recovered the data and i noticed that it has mainly happened with SP1.

i believe it had more to do with the USB enclosure losing sync and
then coming online again and corrupting the partition.  anyway, now i
don't plug it into anyone else's port (I practice safe sync).

i did notice that my ext2 partition didn't give any trouble.  so now i
have the drive mostly formatted ext2 and i keep a small fat32 partition
with the Ext2IFS program to run when i am on XP machines.

so far no problems, but that wouldn't be practical for most people.