Consider your audience
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Bought a little (80 GB) Maxtor external disk for backups yesterday. So far so good. They put the backup software on the disk itself, rather than include a CD/DVD. Okay, I can certainly live with that. And oh look, it comes with Mac OS X software too. That I like. But what they neglected to consider is how exactly I'm supposed to get Mac software off of an NTFS filesystem, and subsequently actually write backup files to it. Headdesk.
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LOL ;)
A certain lack of proper testing there I think.
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Mac OS X can read NTFS, I believe. Can you copy the software onto the main drive, then reformat the backup disk?
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Yeah, OS X has some degree of support for NTFS, though it didn't mount the disk when I connected it for whatever reason. Also, I doubt the less technically adept would have noticed or understood this distinction, and would have merely wondered why they couldn't write anything to their shiny new disk. Heh.
Anyway, I just plugged it into my Windows machine, copied everything off of it, and blew it away with a new HFS+ filesystem.
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Way back, I purchased a Seagate Medalist 1.25 GB hard drive for my 486 PC. Apparently, PCs that old cannot see drives larger than 512 MB, so you need special software to patch the BIOS for larger drives. Seagate shipped Ontrack Disk Manager with the hard drive for this purpose.
I think you can guess the rest.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Seagate shipped Ontrack Disk Manager with the hard drive for this purpose.
"...with..." (as in a seperate medium like a floppy disk or CD-ROM) or "...on..."?
Because in the former I'd fail to see the WTF, whereas the latter would be akin to shipping a safe, locked, with the combination to open it on a piece of paper inside of it...
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@Anonymouse said:
"...with..." (as in a seperate medium like a floppy disk or CD-ROM) or "...on..."?
That's a "with" -- The Ontrack Disk Manager software came on a floppy disk included with the new hard drive. I remember getting one with a Western Digital 1.6 GB hard drive to install on my 486 running Windows 3.1.
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Heh, I remember a 5¼ floppy with Ontrack Disk Manager from my 286. Came with the 40MB drive.
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@coobird said:
@Anonymouse said:
"...with..." (as in a seperate medium like a floppy disk or CD-ROM) or "...on..."?
That's a "with" -- The Ontrack Disk Manager software came on a floppy disk included with the new hard drive.
Okay... then where's the WTF in that?
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Nonono, it very definitely shipped on the hard drive. (For all you who want to split semantic grammatical hairs.)
I was not aware it would even come with any such program, so it wasn't being marketed as a feature. It was just a secret goodie to be found if you checked out the disc on a newer computer. (At the time, I presume I wasn't knowledgeable enough to do the upgrade myself, so we took the PC to someone else and he will have found it. I now have Ontrack Disk Manager on one of my own floppies, with a handwritten label :)
Having said that, and thinking about this more carefully: the BIOS doesn't fail from merely glancing upon the drive, unlike how the BIOS in my PII locked up detecting the 120 GB drive I'd attached. So it's possible that the BIOS will handle up to a 512 MB partition on the drive, and it may have come formatted this way. It's not something I know a lot about.
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The drive actually came NTFS formatted? That's not very common (I wish it was more common, but whatever), usually FAT32 is the standard.
I just bought a 320GB USBHD and I realized the FAT32 when I attempted to copy a file > 4GB onto it. Needless to say FAT32 is no longer :)
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You can mount NTFS as read/write on OS X now!
Sorry, I'm too lazy to find links and such, but if I understand correctly, Google ported FUSE (filesystem-in-userspace) to OSX. Also, NTFS-3G, which is a FUSE driver for mounting NTFS as read/write, has released a STABLE version.
I haven't tried any of this yet, but I expect in the future, I'm going to use NTFS for all my external drives, since I use equal parts of Linux, Windows, and OS X in my daily routine.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Way back, I purchased a Seagate Medalist 1.25 GB hard drive for my 486 PC. Apparently, PCs that old cannot see drives larger than 512 MB, so you need special software to patch the BIOS for larger drives. Seagate shipped Ontrack Disk Manager with the hard drive for this purpose.
I think you can guess the rest.
Only some older PC's had problems with that. During the 486 lifetime, Large Block Addressing (LBA) was introduced, which allowed drives larger than 512MB. I had several 486's and some supported it and others did not.
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@Brendan Kidwell said:
You can mount NTFS as read/write on OS X now!
Sorry, I'm too lazy to find links and such, but if I understand correctly, Google ported FUSE (filesystem-in-userspace) to OSX. Also, NTFS-3G, which is a FUSE driver for mounting NTFS as read/write, has released a STABLE version.
I haven't tried any of this yet, but I expect in the future, I'm going to use NTFS for all my external drives, since I use equal parts of Linux, Windows, and OS X in my daily routine.
Yep. I've got a 300 gig external NTFS-formatted drive. The first time I plugged it into my macbook, I was able to read files off of it without issue. Once I installed the NTFS-3g/FUSE combo package, I was able to write files just as well.
Watch out, if you try this -- most links point to an old setup procedure that involves screwing around in a terminal window and whatnot. That's no longer necessary. There's a single simple, point-and-click package out there that'll install NTFS-3g and FUSE on your mac now.
Not that I remember where I found it...
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Kind of like the laser printer which prints out a description of various error conditions. Like: "Out of paper" (which is always the first page printed when you load new paper...)
Can't remember which printer that was, but it was in the late 80s.
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@wk633 said:
Kind of like the laser printer which prints out a description of various error conditions. Like: "Out of paper" (which is always the first page printed when you load new paper...)
Can't remember which printer that was, but it was in the late 80s.
I've heard stories of an ISP in the early-mid 90's that required all new customers to fill out an online form and download the setup software from their web site. This was back in the days when not everyone had a friend with internet access, there weren't really any cybercafes, and people could rarely use the Internet at work, especially for personal use.
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When I signed up with Earthlink (been an Earthstink customer a long time now ... wow. Anyway ...), I got a CD at Fry's (electronics store here in So Cal; not sure if they're related to the grocery stores in Arizona), then a "helpful Fry's representative" helped me to fill the requisite information in the online form, using the store's Internet connection.
