[plug] FireWire Hard Drive Question

[Brock Woolf]

I have been wondering about buying a Lacie 160GB FireWire External Hard 
Drive, for 2 reasons.
1. It has the capacity i am looking for
2. Portable, and it is FireWire.

The problem I have is I want to be able to hook it up to my Apple G4 
iBook and my Linux Mandrake server, but I am uncertain as to whether you 
can transport it between operating systems. Is the hard drive read my 
the OS as a hard drive with a Fat32/HFS/Ext3 partition? In which case I 
could not use it on my Mac if it was formatted Ext3.
Or does the internal firmware hide the partition information from the OS 
and allow it to act as a "Generic Mass Storage" much like a digital 
camera is, because I can use my Canon PowerShot S45 (Which is USB) on my 
WindowsXP, Linux and MacOS with no problems downloading photos and 
transferring data between the 3.

So i guess my question is about External FireWire Hard Drives in 
general. are they universally adaptable?

- Brock