Today I bought a Maxtor 5000DV drive for MSS because the hard drive on her Mac is only 10 gigabytes. Yesterday we had a celebration for shipping our latest release and us lucky developers got iPods as a thank you (feels so 90s sometimes). However, even the smallest 15 Gb iPod has 5Gb more storage that MSS's whole computer, and there was no way any music would fit, along with her photos and other things, on her machine. So, off to Frys.

The new drive is 200Gb (well 189 when you actually check) which caused a few problems setting it up. The instructions for connecting to a Mac were very simple, just plug the firewire cable into the back of the Mac and the drive should appear on the desktop. Well, it turned out it wasn't that simple after all. I followed the instructions and nothing happened. I went to the Maxtor support website and followed the additional instructions there (including numerous reboots) and still no joy.

Finally I did the sensible thing and applied some unix to the problem. Looking at the output of dmesg showed a line mountmsdosfs(): disk too big, sorry. A bit of poking around on google indicated that BSD systems have problems with very large FAT32 partitions. This meant I was going to have to reformat the disk as HFS+ before Mac OS X could deal with it. The problem was I didn't know how Mac OS X did this. Back to google, plus some poking around in /sbin revealed that the correct thing to do was pdisk followed by newfs_hfs. I found the correct name for the device to partition and format by looking the the system log. When I plugged in the firewire cable it complained about the device it couldn't read. The final piece of the puzzle was how to get root access to perform the partition and format. Fortunately this blog entry on root access under Mac OS X came to my rescue.

Once I knew what to to solving the problem only took a few minutes and the drive's now working nicely. If anyone else has the same problems I hope this helps them out.