Mac UFS partition unreadable

[Gary Corcoran]

Bram Van Steenlandt wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I use both mac and freebsd and would like to have the abbility to use my 
> external firewire drive on both plattforms.
> 
> This should be possible because both are BSD and both can use UFS.
> However when I plug an freebsd formatted drive into my mac he is rather 
> confused by first saying that he can't read this drive and I should 
> format it. Then when I try to mount it from the terminal he complains 
> about the superblocks, when I run some utils they sometimes say they 
> can't determine the partition type, also when I look into /dev there is 
> nothing that indicates that this drive has partitions.
> 
> So I formatted the drive on my mac into UFS. Same thing happens on 
> freebsd. I did some googling and it appears to be so that this could be 
> because of little vs big endian. I am however rather new to freebsd and 
> have no idea what the difference is.
> 
> So what can I do to have a drive readable to both OSes ?
> note:
> drive is 160 Gig seagate
> mac is running 10.3.5
> freebsd is amd 64 5.3 RELEASE
> 
> mac supported disk formats are
> MS-DOS,UFS,HFS,HFS+
> I now that HFS or MS-DOS would work but then I have no support for 160 
> gig / long filenames

MS-DOS FAT32 will support large drives and long filenames,
if you can find a way to get it formatted.  Windows98 would
be one way to get it formatted (Win2000 and WinXP will NOT
allow a large (>32GB) disk to be formatted as FAT32).

Gary