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Comment by mithrilskeleton | Hacker News Reader

UDF is pretty cool. It is an open standard supported by Windows and Mac OS X, but for some reason linux doesn't support versions higher than 2.01

Maybe somebody here has the skill and time to fix this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format

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To be fair, the only versions higher than 2.01 listed on that page are 2.50 (which adds the ability to store all metadata on a separate partition... not that useful) and 2.60 (which adds support for "partial overwrites" on sequentially-recorded media).

Neither of those seem terribly useful for the "UDF filesystem on a shared hard-disk partition" use-case we're talking about, so I don't think Linux's limit of UDF 2.01 is very important in practice.

It's important if it will refuse to mount a later version. I don't know if that's the case, just guessing here.

So I actually have a 16GB usb formatted as UDF. It seems to work perfectly in Linux, Windows vista+, and read only support in XP. I need to explicitly unmount it in Windows though, otherwise it becomes read-only the next time I plug it in to a Windows machine (mounting it on linux fixes this).

Now I've never gotten it to work on OSX though, which is by trying my friends machines. I've always used the linux udf utility to format it, and have tried both with and without a partition table. It seems OSX, unlike Windows and Linux, actually respects the partition id.

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