External HDD partitioning questions, rather specific

[SteveMobs]

Hey and thanks for clicking in.

I've tried searching and found a decent article:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...ing_tiger.html

But can't seem to figure this out.

I just received a 500gb WD Mypassport and was wondering how I could go about partitioning it for Windows/Mac/Everything else.

So, I've got bootcamp on my macbook and use it to run AutoCad in windows, I need to back up those drawings. How would I go about formatting my external HDD such that I can have 3 partitions;

1. About 450gb for Time Machine backups in Mac OSX
2. About 15gb for backing up my Windows stuff
3. And maybe 35gb that can be accessed in any OS, like a huge USB stick type thing, so I can transfer movies from a Ubuntu machine to my mac or something like that.

I understand they won't be exactly that due to formatting, etc. but ballpark figures.

I've tried reading up on this stuff but am a bit confused by all the FAT32 stuff, whatever that means.

Thanks for your help,
-Steve

[MacDawg]

Check out the various file systems here: MR Guide: File Systems

For your Time Machine - format as HFS+ (Mac OSX)

For your Windows - you can use WinClone and clone your whole system
That would be done to HFS+ as well
If you want to keep it as pure Windows you have 2 options
You can make it FAT32 (MS DOS (FAT))
It will be read/write by Mac and Windows but it is limited to 4 GB transfers
Or, you could install NTFS-3G and format as NTFS and read/write from Mac and Windows

For your last partition... same as above

[spinnerlys]

Does the following help?

http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems

FAT32 is a file system which can be read and written to by Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but the maximum file size is 4GB.

[SteveMobs]

Thanks for the links, I'll read through them and see if they're what I need.

[SteveMobs]

I want to get rid of the prepackaged WD software that's on the drive, but I still want to encrypt the drive.

Any problems with time machine and encryption?

Also, if I do format and then properly encrypt the drive, will it need to reformat again when I want to partition the drive into three pieces?

Is this possible?

[SteveMobs]

Ok,

So I've got everything sorted, didn't bother with the encryption though.

But with three partitions, whenever I plug in the drive, three separate drives show up, how can I unify all 3 of them so that only 1 drive icon shows up?

Thanks