Creating a media partition for both windows and mac dual use

[bmastudent]

Hi,

I've tried looking for existing posts on this topic but I haven't been able to find anything specific. Is it possible to create a partition that both windows xp and mac os x can read/write to? This would be a separate 3rd partition without operating system or programs on it. I imagine it would be possible since both OS X and WinXP can read/write to a flash drive fine but all I've been seeing is NO. The things stored on this partition would be files such as word/excel documents and mp3's.

What would be the most efficient way to do so? My reason for this is before on my windows machine, if there was a problem with the OS, I could just reformat the OS partition without losing my data.

[nomar383]

Hmmm, well a FAT32 Partition would do the trick, but I don't know if you can do it on the fly. You may have to start from scratch with the Leopard Install Disk. Like so:

1. Boot Leopard Disk
2. Use Disk Utility to format into 1 HFS+ and 1 FAT32 drive
3. Install OS X on HFS+
4. Boot into the HFS+ Leopard Drive and run the Boot Camp Program to Partition the HFS+ Drive on the fly
5. Now you **should** have 3 partitions

1 Leopard partition
1 Windows partition
1 FAT32 Transfer Partition

I hope that all makes sense, maybe there is a better solution, I'm just throwing out what i think would work

[bmastudent]

I'm new on the mac but from what I can tell, I can't figure out how to create a FAT32 partition from the HFS+ partition.

[nomar383]

Have you ever used Disk Utility? There is a partition option for the drive and you should be able to choose MS-DOS format, which I believe is FAT32 (readable by both mac and windows, just like the flash drive). The catch is you can only do this type of partition from the Leopard Install Disk and it will require you to completely blank the drive. No big deal if you have a Time Machine Backup, a similar backup, or a new machine anyways.

Long story short, what you want could take several hours. If it's worth it to you, do it. Otherwise stick with a thumb drive or an external HD.

[bmastudent]

From my disk utility, I can't seem to create new partitions with different file formats. If I add a partition onto the existing boot camp partition, it will only let me make an NTFS partition. If I try to add it to my OSX partition, it will only let me do it in "MacOS extended (journaled)".

Would I have to blank a current partition or blank the entire harddrive?

Have you ever used Disk Utility? There is a partition option for the drive and you should be able to choose MS-DOS format, which I believe is FAT32 (readable by both mac and windows, just like the flash drive). The catch is you can only do this type of partition from the Leopard Install Disk and it will require you to completely blank the drive. No big deal if you have a Time Machine Backup, a similar backup, or a new machine anyways.

Long story short, what you want could take several hours. If it's worth it to you, do it. Otherwise stick with a thumb drive or an external HD.

[nomar383]

I think you will probably have to blank the whole HD to do it

[bmastudent]

So I was reading a little bit about CrossOver which allows running some windows applications and in comparing the different options for running windows programs, it mentions a swap file area or network drive.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/differences/

Does anybody know how to create such a swap file area? I think that might be what I'm looking for.

[nomar383]

I think the swap area that is mentioned would be referring to something like a thumb drive or a network drive

They aren't talking about anything crazy or anything that hasn't already been discussed