08-15-2008, 08:16 PM

I read the following answer at Yahoo! Answers. I don't believe that the answer is correct. I've been able to burn CDs or DVDs on a PC and then use them on a Mac. Is the following quote correct or not?

What sort of disc? A Mac should happily read from FAT32 format media but will struggle with NTFS.

08-15-2008, 08:42 PM

Use your System Profiler, choose ATA or Optical Drive (not sure, am using Panther here) from the left pane, and see what CD/DVD formats are supported.

For example, on this old G3, I deliberately took out the dvd drive and replaced it with a CD only drive. It's a Matshita which supports CD-RW. Very limiting, but that's not an issue. On my eMac, I have a drive which supports any format that was in existence at the time the computer was manufactured.

As for FAT32 and NTFS, those are file system formats, encompassing hard drives and flash drives, not optical disks (as far as I know).

08-15-2008, 08:53 PM

We're comparing apples to oranges here (no pun intended). Hard and floppy disks use a variety of different filesystems, FAT, FAT32 and NTFS are from the Windows world. HFS and HFS+ are from the Mac world and ext2/3, ReiserFS and ZFS are from the UNIX world. Mac OS X can read and write to just about all of them, some require additional software to do so.

Optical discs on the other hand, mainly use the ISO 9660 filesystem, and an extension to ISO 9660, known as Joliet. ISO 9660 was designed with OS interoperability in mind, so Macs, Windows machines and Linux boxes can read and write them with no problems.