Lost half a disk partition due to power outage

[adsl3g]

Dammit... I have lost my 160gb firewire data disk that was OS X formatted due to a power outage. Why is OSX file system so finicky when a disk is removed without unmounting? I could recover important data as OSX mounted it but gave a warning that it is buggered. The majority of data was lost but I did have backups.

FAT32 is not so sensitive when it is unceremoniously ejected from the OS and I have never had a problem in a disk being screwed up if this happens.

Luckly the iMac is on a UPS so there were no problems there (I have stuck the FW drive on the UPS as well now).

I am wondering if it is not better to format my data disk to FAT32 instead of OSX .. any comments here as to what functionality I will lose if I do this.
How much slower will disk access be if I format FAT32 for an external disk.

 

[bwana]

Get yourself a copy of DiskWarrior if you want the data back. Its also a good app to have in case of emergency.

AFAIK the main drawback to fat32 is you wont be able to have any files over 4gb.

BTW - I'm prone to disconnecting drives without ejecting them first and have never had a problem.

 

[adsl3g]

Get yourself a copy of DiskWarrier if you want the data back. Its also a good app to have in case of emergency.

AFAIK the main drawback to fat32 is you wont be able to have any files over 4gb.

BTW - I'm prone to disconnecting drives without ejecting them first and have never had a problem.

I don't have those.... what file would one have that is so big? DVD's are broken up into 1gb files. Don't want to miss somethink.

 

[bwana]

I don't have those.... what file would one have that is so big? DVD's are broken up into 1gb files. Don't want to miss somethink.

Just had a quick look at my files and I had plenty of disk image files larger then 4gb.

I'm pretty sure that disconnecting the drive while it is writing data is going to cause problems regardless of the format - is there any reason to think fat32 wouldnt suffer the same fate?

EDIT - a bit of info about Journaling - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107249

 

[adsl3g]

Just had a quick look at my files and I had plenty of disk image files larger then 4gb.

I'm pretty sure that disconnecting the drive while it is writing data is going to cause problems regardless of the format - is there any reason to think fat32 wouldnt suffer the same fate?

EDIT - a bit of info about Journaling - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107249

Agreed, but in my experience, it would only cause problems on the file that was written, not the whole partition as in OS X and that is why I am getting a bit weary of this - could be that spotlight or something similar was busy indexing the OSX partitoned disk?

 

[bwana]

Agreed, but in my experience, it would only cause problems on the file that was written, not the whole partition as in OS X and that is why I am getting a bit weary of this - could be that spotlight or something similar was busy indexing the OSX partitoned disk?

It could be - was it a newly introduced drive?

For me its a no-brainer - unless I know I'm going to want to use the disk with windows I use HFS+

 

[koffiejunkie]

Sounds fishy, HFS+ is a jounalled filesystem - if anything it should be way more robust than FAT32

 

[adsl3g]

It could be - was it a newly introduced drive?

For me its a no-brainer - unless I know I'm going to want to use the disk with windows I use HFS+

No, its been on the iMac a week now.

Sounds fishy, HFS+ is a jounalled filesystem - if anything it should be way more robust than FAT32

I have had problems with another 80gig usb drive as well... formatted it to FAT32 eventually.

 

[bwana]

Sounds fishy, HFS+ is a jounalled filesystem - if anything it should be way more robust than FAT32

Agreed. I've been looking around a lot and other than the desire to share between Windows and OsX I still cant find any benefit of using fat32. Everything I've read so far portrays HFS+ as being more robust as well as faster.