Formatting a disk for Macintosh using Linux

Question

I've been asked to move data from an old external hard drive to a new one, and to make the new one compatible with the Macintosh. (The old drive's USB connection has died, and I'm connecting to old the drive using a PC card that provieds an eSATA to the drive. The recipient's Macintosh doesn't have a PC card slot, so she can't access the old drive anymore. Hence, the new drive.)

Naturally, I'm doing this data transfer using Linux. I've discovered that I can format the drive as HFS+ using mkfs.hfsplus from the hfsprogs package. But I need to know: do I need to do anything special with the partition table? Is there a special Macintosh partition table format that I need to format this disk to? If so, what tools can I use to get the right format for the partition table?

Answer 1

Well, Mac OS X supports msdos (aka vfat or fat32) and as of 10.6.5 supports fat64, so that's one option.

Mac OS X can read the major partition table types used on PCs. Your best option though would be to use a GUID partition table (GPT). You can use gparted to make one. You will also need kernel support for GPT.