[plug] FireWire Hard Drive Question

Cameron Patrick cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au
Sat Aug 14 14:20:48 WST 2004


Brock Woolf wrote:

> 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.

Just to be pedantic, a USB Mass Storage device appears to the OS as if
it's a normal hard drive with partitions of a particular file system.
These are transportable between operating systems if you use partition
types and file systems supported by all the systems you want to use it
with.  Your best bet is a DOS-type partition table with FAT32.

Most digital cameras /aren't/ mass storage, though.  These days
they're most likely to be PTP (e.g. my Canon A80 is, and the Kodak I
had before it was one of the very first PTP cameras), which abstracts
the file system details away, so that the OS can say e.g. "give me a
list of files" and "give me the contents of such and such a file".

I've never used Firewire so I can't help you with the particulars of
your question, though.

Cameron.




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