Partitioning Questions

I know I have had a deluge of questions lately but bear wtih me, I just got a 500 GB external drive. Anyways, it comes in FAT32 which normally would be fine except I have single files bigger than 4 GB. So, as much as I would like the most compatibility, I want more to be able to backup my PowerBook's harddrive. I am going to reformat the drive into HFS+. Now should I make two partitions? One as a journaled HFS+ partition for super duper to clone my drive in to. And another HFS+ maybe non journaled to store files.

Do I even need two partitions? Is a bootable clone even worth it? The only reason I thought I may need two partitions is because of the "ignore permissions" option. Apparently it would be better to turn that on if I wanted to plug my drive into someone else's computer.

Also, I know linux can read HFS+, but can it write to it?

Journaled HFS+ is the best option. I see no need to create two partitions, one should do just fine.

Linux support for HFS+ is spotty - some distros have it, some don't. For those that do, kernel module hfsplus does support full read/write access.

Prior to getting my current Mac, I was a full time Linux user. I transferred all my files from my Linux box to the Mac using an external hard drive which I first formatted with the Mac for journaled HFS+. I then used SuSE 9.3 to transfer the files to the hard drive (write access!) and then used the Mac to read them off. So, it definitely works.

SuSE 9.3 and Ubuntu Dapper Drake definitely have hfsplus support - I am running both distros on a Linux PC I have. Arch Linux definitely does NOT support hfsplus - I also have this distro and tested this. You will need to test your specific distro if it is not one of the above to determine if it supports hfsplus.

The only reason I considered two partitions was because I was going to use one partition as a boot drive, and I don't know if having other files on there would interfere with the boot drive because it is an exact clone.