Are Hard Drive Specific To A Certain Operating System

Factual Questions
1

I was talking to someone and he was instisting that certain hard drive are made to be specific to an operating system.

I think I was totally misunderstanding what he was going for.

I have always thought a hard drive is a hard drive. You can put Windows on it, you can put Linux on it, or Apple or any other O/S you want.

So basically if I buy a Western Digital 1tb hard drive, I can install any O/S on it right?

You just have to format it in some cases.

He seemed to be saying if you want to install Apple or Linux on a system you need a particular type of hard drive from installing Windows.

He’s in IT but English isn’t his first language so I think I’m misunderstanding something. First of all I know darn well you can have Windows and Linux on the same physical hard drive you just need to partion it.

So first of all let me affirm, a hard drive can be used to install any O/S.

And if so, what possibly could he have meant. Any ideas? We were talking personal computers, but it got me wondering.

This may be a more IMHO but I’ll put it here first and a MOD can move it, if needed

Thanks

2

I’ve never seen a hard drive that was designated as only good for a specific OS.

When I built my system, I just chose the drives I wanted and Windows installed without a hitch.

3

A hard drive is just a magnetic disk that you can put 1s and 0s on. It’s entirely up to the software to arrange the 1s and 0s in whatever order pleases it most.

There may be software the HD manufacturer has written that’s designed to work with Windows or Mac for added value, but it’s never been necessary for basic operation.

4

The operating system needs drivers that work with the hard drive and needs to have ports that you can connect to the hard drive and the ports need to run on a frequency that’s compatible with the hard drive. If you’ve got that, you’re golden.

5

Just as an aside question would it possible to have one physical hard drive. Divide it into two partions and stick Windows on one and a Mac O/S on the other.

Or even three? One physical hard drive and have three partions with Mac, Windows and Linux O/S

I don’t need to know how to do this, I was wondeirng if it’d be possible

Thanks

6

Yes, eminently. Mac OS X has Boot Camp installed by default. You’ll still need drivers for all operating systems that need to access the disk.

7

Thanks for the info. I think the person I was talking to was indeed referring to drivers.

But it’s nice to know, thanks again

8

If memory serves, at one point (> 10 years ago), hard drives in Sun workstations had a special modification so you had to buy them from Sun.

9

Let’s remember that virtually the entire world has been standardized on ATA and SCSI for the past 20 years. It would be nearly impossible to find a HD that couldn’t be made to work on any current operating system.

10

Sun used to have this insistence on using 512 byte sectors and this caused problems when trying to use generic CDROM drives as they’d moved on a bit. It was a case of checking for a jumper on the back that would let you make it Sun compatible. I seem to recall you could only boot from the CDROM if it supported 512 byte sectors instead of the (by that time) standard 2048 byte sector drives.

Also, a lot of the top end hardware vendors want you to use drives with their firmware, otherwise all the spanky monitoring features get disabled. Having talked to a variety of vendor tech support droids these firmware mods ranged from simply setting specific device strings (and doubling the price) to actually recoding significant parts of the f/w to make the drives work better with their controllers (RAID etc).

PC

11

Another thing that may be what your friend was thinking of is that different operating systems require the disk to be formatted differently. You can use the same physical hard drive, but you may need to reformat the drive (or partition) to get the sectors and the allocation table into a pattern that can be recorgnized by the OS.

12

I did mention formatting, but he was Chinese, so if there was a problem, it probably was one of us misunderstanding each other :slight_smile:

13

I have. A lot of old DEC equipment had DEC specific hard drives in it. Most of the early drives were specifically manufactured for DEC. The drive manufacturers may have taken the exact same drive, stuck a different label on it, and sold it to the PC market, but only drives specifically made for DEC would work with VMS.

Many of the later drives were standard drives sold for multiple systems and operating systems, but often had special firmware tweaks or formatting done on them so that VMS would recognize them. You could put one of these drives in a PC< but if you did, you would lose the VMS tweaks when you formatted the disk for a PC, and then the Vax would never recognize it as a disk ever again.

14

There was a time when some disks were manufactured with an interface for only type of hardware, which might only have one OS with drivers available, but an interface and drivers could be created for any disk drive if there was a need.

Drives can be physically partitioned to maintain multiple OSs. Some OS can be run within the file system of another. And there are also emulators that can provide different OS functionality, and Virtual Machines that can run multiple OS. Those are variations of running an OS within the file system of another OS.

15

By the way, I’m not sure this is clear from the previous posts so I’ll spell it out here.

There are drives that are sold as being specific to a particular operating system. What this means though is what Bosstone was saying. The drive comes formatted and/or with software specific to that operating system. Sometimes this software or formatting can cause problems for other operating systems. Windows specific drives for example sometimes come with drivers and backup utilities and such that get Mac OS confused.

Physically though, there’s no difference between a Mac drive and a Windows drive. If you do get a drive that is Windows specific and you need it to work on a Mac (or vice-versa), the worst you have to do is wipe the drive and reformat it.

16

Would this preclude taking an external drive with data (JPEGs, in my case) created on a Windows machine and reading it on a Mac?

17

I’ve put Vista and Windows 7 on hard drives from the XP era. I’ve put Windows ME on a Windows 98 computer.

It makes no difference.

18

No, Macs can read Windows formatted discs just fine. The reverse is not true.

19

Just to be clear, 'cause I want to make sure I’m understand, assuming today’s SATA drives, nothing old, one that would be sold today. If had the drivers and equipment and cables, I could take a 1tb hard drive for instance, and partition it and put Linux, Windows and a MAC O/S on it.

The when the computer boots up, choose which one to boot into? Or is it a matter of not a real O/S but an emulator.

We were talking about current SATA hard drives, I’ll have to wait till I see my friend again to ask him, specifically what he meant. Thanks for the answers so far, interesting stuff

20

Unless you want to do a lot of hacking to make it work, in your scenario above you need to start with a Mac, but then yes, you could add Windows and Linux partitions.

If you start with another type of computer, it’s much more difficult (but not impossible) to get OS X to run on it. But that has nothing to do with the hard drive.