Using Lacie hardrive on Linux/windows/Mac

Crazykiwi

I just purchased a Lacie 1TB USB hardrive. When I plug it into Windows it says it will make a windows only partition... when I plug it in to Mac it says it will make a Mac only partition OR on both systems it says I can have 32gigs that will work on Linux but the rest will only work on the OS it was installed on. How do I format this drive to work effectively on all three OS's? My old Lacie and Acomdata drives never had an problem with working on all three.

It says you can compete the install on a windows machine then reformat the drive for your needs but how do I do that? Can someone explain how to re-format it (Using GUI), what program to use, what file system to use and so forth to use. Also is there any loss of space or chance of messing up the drive?

Thanks,

Niall

The product:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11014

woboyle

Assuming you only want this to work with Linux, then run fdisk, delete the current partition(s), create a linux partition, and save the partition table (with fdisk w(rite) command). Then you can format the partition as any suitable type. If you want, you can create the partition as an NTFS type and format it as an ntfs partition so you can use it with both Windows and Linux. The only caveat here is that older Linux systems don't support write access to ntfs volumes, although you can get the ntfs-3g driver for most of those that will support it properly.