using carbon clone dvd

eurotrotter

just got my new hard drive there, and i must use carbon clone copy to copy all contents of the current internal hd to the new 160gb internal hd hich i purchased
im going to place the 160gb hard drive in the enclosure, however there is a yellow sticker on the enclosure that reads: hard drive must be formatted iusing FAT 32
how do i find out which format my current internal hd is in?
and i remember readin the bootcamp pdf file saying that one particular format was more compatible tan the other, i think it was FAT32,not too sure though
any help appreciated
thanks
ed

pa

Your internal hard drive is formatted in HFS+. You can format the external in HFS+, NTFS, or FAT32.

If you format in HFS+, only Macs will be able to read/write to it. Windows computers would need 3rd-party software to see it. You will be able to run Mac applications directly from the external drive.

If you go with NTFS, Windows computers will be able to read/write to the drive, but Macs will only be able to read from it. Mac applications stored on the drive will not work, and documents created on a Mac will lose some metadata when moved onto the drive.

Finally, if you use FAT32, both Macs and PCs will be able to read and write from the drive. Again, Mac applications will not work, and documents will lose some metadata. Also, the drive will be somewhat more prone to corruption.

If you're not familiar with what I mean by "lose some metadata", don't panic - you won't lose any actual data from your documents. What will be removed is some specific information about the file which isn't supported in non-Mac filesystems, such as the type of the file, and which application created it.

Hugh_C

pa wrote:

Finally, if you use FAT32, both Macs and PCs will be able to read and write from the drive. Again, Mac applications will not work, and documents will lose some metadata. Also, the drive will be somewhat more prone to corruption..

I think you also run into some sort of file size limit, which may only be appropriate to large quicktimes and the like...

pa

hughchal wrote:

I think you also run into some sort of file size limit, which may only be appropriate to large quicktimes and the like...

Yes, the limit for a single file on FAT32 is 4GB. The theoretical limit of both NTFS and HFS+ is 16 terrabytes.

eurotrotter

i thought it was just a case of conenctin gup the160gb HD and clicking duplicate on the carbon clone copy software. So do i need to format the drive first,how do i go about doing this?
I will be installing xp as well using bootcamp soon enough, but i think that the bootcamp istallation process is able to format the windows partition seperately to the mac partition during the bootcamp/windows installation process.
can someone donfirm this for me.
I returned the hd enclosure since and was told that he fat32 was required to unlock some extra features, so the enclosure actually supports al formats after all.
I would reall appreciate on the above issues, im new to macs, and am delighted i made the move.
thanks in advance
ed

Sad Professor

Eurotrotter, just open up Disk Utility, click on the new drive, select the Erase tab, choose your volume format (Mac OS Extended, journaled) and erase. Or if you want to partition the drive, select the Partition tab and choose how many partitions you want, how big, etc.

If you do the latter just make sure you click on options and select GUID partition table (so it will be bootable on your intel mac).

What are you using the new drive for? Backup and Bootcamp?