how to format my external drive?

[Edith Frost]

On Tuesday I wrote:

> I'm dual-booting YDL and OSX on my iBook.  I have a new Maxtor
> external firewire hard drive that I want to use to store MP3s. 
> <...> How can I format this thing so it's mountable and writeable
> on both sides, and also allow for the long filenames?

To follow up on this, I ended up going with ext2.  I made a single
partition using fdisk and created the filesystem using the 'parted'
tool.  I don't know why, but that was the only thing that worked without
getting stuck or giving me errors afterward ("no magic number" or some
such).  I tried FAT32 first, but never could get that mounted in OSX, so
I gave up on that idea.  I'm just happy I have a working drive that
doesn't screw up my filenames.

Next thing to try is what Clint suggested:

> If you want to remain *Pure* ( :-) ), you can play with the beta 
> extension for Mac OS X that allows mounting of the ext2 (Linux) 
> filesystem:
> 
> <https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/>

Will do.  Thanks for your help Clint!!

Edith