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Buy a fireware hard drive, want NFTS and Mac parition on the same drive... Help!

A

animefx

macrumors regular
Original poster
I have a MacBook with Mac OS X (of course) and Bootcamp with Windows XP.

I'm buying an external firewire hard drive 320 gigs, and I want 2 paritions. 160gigs for NTFS (windows) and 160 gigs of the Mac file system.

I am not asking to boot Windows off of the external drive.

I'm thinking of using parition magic on windows to make 160 gigs NFTS, and then booting into Mac and using disk utility to format the remaining free space on the drive as Mac file system.

Will this work, or is there a better/easier way of doing this? Is it even possible?
 
Use DiskUtility to partition the disk into two partitions; one for the Mac in HFS+ and one for Windows in MS-DOS (aka FAT32). When you use the drive in Windows, reformat the partition to NTFS. The MS-DOS format option seems to only be available when I boot off of my restore CD's.

I recently got a 100GB 2.5" drive that I use externally for backups of my Mac and my Gateway laptop. I wanted three partitions; 1 HFS+ for my Mac Backup, 1 NTFS for PC Backup, and 1 FAT32 for files that both computers share. I booted onto my restore CD and made three partitions; 1 HFS+ and 2 MS-DOS. In Windows, I reformatted the two MS-DOS partitions to NTFS and FAT32 (Windows didn't like the way the Mac formatted the FAT32 partition).
 
That sounds good to me. Hopefully XP likes my disk utility formated FAT32.

I wish I could find my 12% off best buy coupon. I found a 320 gig firewire/usb2 external hard drive thats on sale for $179... 12% off of that would be nice, although only a minor savings after tax.
 
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