file system for FreeBSD, OS X and WinXP?

[Chris Whitehouse]

Eric Kjeldergaard wrote:
> On 12/31/06, Keith Beattie <ksbeattie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I recently picked up a big 700G external USB/Firewire Seagate drive with
>> the
>> hopes of using it to store my growing collection of music, photos, etc.
>> currently spread across several different machines (all with nearly full
>> discs).  My hope is that I could use a single file system on this drive
>> which could then be plugged into any of these machines which run FreeBSD,
>> OS
>> X, or WinXP.
>>
> 
> My usual recommendation for this very problem is the ext2 filesystem.  As
> far as I know, the drivers exist and work reasonably well for win32, 
> MacOSX,
> linux, BSD, and several others.  If taking it to machines that may not have
> network to get FS drivers is an issue, you could consider several small
> partitions each with an FS driver for a specific OS on it.
> 

I chose ext2fs for the same reason. It worked fine until a power cut 
crashed the FreeBSD machine it was attached to and left the ext2fs 
partition in a big mess. I couldn't mount it until I had fsck'd it 
which needs sysutils/e2fsprogs. I think in the end I didn't lose data 
but now I don't trust it for holding data I don't want to lose.

Chris