Re: Jaz 1Gb on hamm dist

[David Stern <dstern@u.washington.edu>]

On Sun, 06 Dec 1998 21:02:56 EST, Brandon Mitchell wrote:

> There is some crazy way they format/partition the disks so they work on
> both macs and pc's, but it results in you needing to use the 4th partition
> on pc's.  That's about all I know, except that Iomega isn't the only one
> to do this, Syquest does this too I think.
> 
> I've got a zip disk too, which is why I'm familiar with this problem.  I
> thought my partition table looked weird like that too.  But I went ahead
> and repartitioned/reformated the disks for e2fs.

I now see the unmaintained jazz mini-howto explains it:

  6.4.  Why does Iomega use partition number 4 ?

  Partition 4 is the default partition used by Macintosh.  

  On a Mac, the first partition is reserved for boot info, the second 
for
  system info, the third is the resource fork, and the fourth is the 
data
  fork.

  Anyway, PCs and most other systems can deal with having to work on 
the
  4th partition whereas the Mac can't deal with anything else.  Iomega 
  sends all their preformatted media with partition 4 used so that both 
  PC's and Macs can read them and everyone avoids a big compatibility
  headache. (PCs with mac-disk-reading software usually expect the data
  to be on partition 4)

Those Mac people.. :)

Thanks!
-- 
David
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                                               dstern@u.washington.edu