For my birthday (yay for me!) today I received a shiny new external hdd from my parents. This was overly generous as there was a hidden agenda involved - they want their computer, and my mum's school computer backed up as well.

I'm not fully up on the file systems in OSX yet, so I was wondering how I should partition/format this drive so that it's plug-inable to WinXP boxes, my Tiger box, and my Mini which still runs Panther.

Suggestions are much appreciated, as always!

depending on the size (???) fat32. It's the only FS that will be 100% compatible with both OSX and XP

It's a 250Gb drive, and fat32 has a practical maximum of 32Gb with the Win boxes (correct me if I'm wrong).

Could I do a multiple partition drive with one NTFS, a FAT32, and a Mac (HFS?) partition - would the computers at least read their native file systems, or would they get stuck while determining the structure of the disk?

FAT32 technically supports up to 2TB (or 8TB, depeding on who you talk to). The 32GB limit applies to Microsoft's format utility in 2K/XP only, as they're trying to get people to switch to NTFS.

You could partition and format with a 3rd party util, or possibly fdisk and format from Win98/Me.
I've seen 120GB FAT32 partitions that work just fine.

I' d definitely recommend partitioning the drive.
*Especially* if you're going to be backing up your parent's stuff as well.
Don't want their stuff mixing with yours

OSX can read NTFS so no problems there (cannot write though). But XP shits itself on HSF. I guess it would just apear as unformatted space...?

for more info... have a read of this thread

EDIT: i would avoid using an overly large (128gb+) fat32 partition due to the large cluster size and increased wasted space.

Darn it - I thought I'd searched through the forums... sorry for the dupe!

Will read through that thread and make a decision.

Thanks for the assist!