Disk problems again

My issues with disks seem to be endless. As I mentioned earlier, I have repartitioned my Lacie BigDisk drive to host one big FAT partition (200GB) for storing my photos. This partition is accessible both to Windows and Mac. Then I had the old shrunk NTFS partition that I tried to format with Mac for backup purposes without success.

I destroyed that partition with Windows and tried to repartition the drive with Mac, but Mac’s Disk Utility could not create a new partition without changing the size of the other partitions. How peculiar and awkward!

To solve this issue, I once again attached the disk to Windows and created another FAT partition (80GB). Then I reattached the disk to Mac and tried to format that partition to Mac native format. The Disk Utility told me plain and simple that an underlying program has not been able to do its job and the partition could not be formatted. The Mac lost access to all partitions in this process and I had to eject the disk from the Disk Utility.

Attaching the drive back to PC, I found out that Mac had scrambled the whole disk and the bigger FAT partition was also lost! Fortunately I had everything backed up in another Windows box, so no data was lost.

I could see the partition with Windows tools, but they couldn’t write to the disk. The disk was marked BAD or just not accessible…

After I had tried all tricks in my arsenal and searched Google for rescue, I decided to attach the drive to another Windows machine in the living room. This machine did not see anything on the drive, but it managed to create new partitions and format them properly.

Now I had the partitions in place and I could copy the files back. This was, fortunately enough, a smooth operation. The final task was to connect the drive back to the first Windows box and assign the correct drive letters and paths back.

I learned that Mac’s disk tools are inferior and I’d better keep my hands out of them when using shared drives. I created a Linux partition to the drive, I’ll check whether Mac can use it after I have gained enough confidence that I don’t break anything (and I have made backups recently).