Maxtor One Touch Questions

[jeremy.king]

If I were to get a Maxtor One Touch Drive can I setup two partitions (one NTFS and one HFS+) such that I could use the one touch backup functionality from both a PC (running XP) and my beloved Mac (running 10.3.3)?

Does anyone have experience with these specific drives?

For those who want to tell me to get the Western Dig, don't bother, thats the drive thats about to fail.

[tomf87]

We just bought one of these at work, and it's been a great drive, albeit a little heavy for toting around.

I do not have the drive in my possession at the moment to test that, and I probably won't be getting it back any time in the near future. From what it sounds like, though, I think you could do it because the other partition would not be readable by the other OS.

[nargot]

For those who want to tell me to get the Western Dig, don't bother, thats the drive thats about to fail.

Well i wont tell you to just get a WD drive then :)
Why would you want to partition it? Can't you run as a windows format drive and access via OSX? Can you partition (easily) a drive for both windows and mac file systems?

[jeremy.king]

nargot, you might be one to something, I don't know if you can format cross platform or not thats why I ask. My fear was if I use something like FAT32, that I would lose some of the HFS+ features from backing up and then restoring (lets hope that would never happen).

As for my 100GB WD drive...its starting to go CLICK CLICK....CLICK CLICK....CLICK CLICK....then starts up - sometimes.

[nargot]

As for my 100GB WD drive...its starting to go CLICK CLICK....CLICK CLICK....CLICK CLICK....then starts up - sometimes.

eww, click of death in a new drive... i see your point, i might be a bit more careful with mine. I've been fortunate with drives of late (ie never turn them off and no problems, so must be getting complacent) Well i'm no expert on windows FS, the only dual format drive i run is a 256mb flash drive and i do experience some file name difficulties. Maybe you could post in the software posts to find out about formatting for dual platforms and compatability? and if there is software that can do it?

[rughdyrngr]

I tried to format my FireWire/USB 2 drive that way. The mac would not let me partition it as HFS+ and FAT32. I tried it under WINXP and had the same problem. The OS's would not reconize the two partitions and kept wanting to erase the "unknown" partition before putting its favorite flavor on. I tried to make it 50% one and 50% unused, it always came out the same no mater which platform I started the process on. I gave up and formatted it as FAT32 on the WinXP box and both Windows XP Pro and Mac OS 10.2.8 were happy. Good luck.

[jeremy.king]

I gave up and formatted it as FAT32 on the WinXP box and both Windows XP Pro and Mac OS 10.2.8 were happy. Good luck.

Well I think I will just do that. I haven't found anyone that has had luck with two partitions setup the way I was thinking.

FAT32 should do the job.