1 drive / 2 partitions / hsf+ & ntfs

[typeadam]

New here: hello.

Basically the title says it all.
I have a 1TB external drive.
I have a Mac at work, Windows Vista, XP, and 7 at home, and Ubuntu at home too.
I want 700GB to be NTFS and 300GB to be HSF+.
How can I do this?
This is what I already tried but failed:
1. Using MacDrive, I created a 300GB HSF+ partition. So I thought I could use Windows Disc Management to format the remaining 700GB as NTFS but it keeps telling me the "media is write protected."
So I deleted all the partitions and started over.
2. Using Windows Disc Mgmt I created a 700GB NTFS partition, then opened MacDrive to format the remaining 300 as HSF+ but MacDrive can only do the entire volume - it can't just do 1 partition.
3. I remember reading somewhere where you can create an HSF+ partition and a FAT32 partition in Mac OS, then convert the FAT into NTFS on a Windows machine. Is this true? If so, how do I do this on a Mac - I'm a fairly new Mac user.
Some notes:
1. Since I'm using MacDrive, I'm aware I can format the entire disc in HSF+ and my Windows will read it, but sometimes I hook it up to PCs w/o MacDrive so I need an NTFS volume. So 1TB in HSF is a no go.
2. An entire FAT32 drive is no good either b/c 90% of my files are over 4GB in size.

So basically what I want is 2 partitions - 700GB NTFS, 300GB HSF+
I'm not looking for an alternate or a "work-around," I'm looking for that.

Thank you!

 

[Hellhammer]

So what you have now? If you have 1TB HFS+, open Disk Utility and create 700GB FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition and then boot into Windows and make that NTFS

 

[typeadam]

So what you have now? If you have 1TB HFS+, open Disk Utility and create 700GB FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition and then boot into Windows and make that NTFS

I appreciate the quick response! I will have to try that tomorrow morning when I get into work. Can I just ask - is that fairly simple and self-explanatory to do on a Mac? Again, I'm very new to Macs and not sure if there's some terminology I should be aware of when I attempt this tomorrow.
Thanks!

 

[Hellhammer]

I appreciate the quick response! I will have to try that tomorrow morning when I get into work. Can I just ask - is that fairly simple and self-explanatory to do on a Mac? Again, I'm very new to Macs and not sure if there's some terminology I should be aware of when I attempt this tomorrow.
Thanks!

Well, you open Disk Utility, select your HD, click partition tab, click +, set the format, name, size etc, click execute and voilà

Quite easy thing to do

 

[typeadam]

OK, so using Disk Utils in Mac, I managed to create a 300GB "Mac OS Extended" partition and a 700GB "FAT" (no option for FAT32) partition. And the Mac displays them both. But when I hook the drive up to my Vista machine, it doesn't see the FAT partition. Since I use MacDrive, I can see the 300 but not the 700. And in Vista when I open up Disk Management it shows the 700 as "Unallocated." So I try to turn it into a NTFS partition but it tells me the "media is write protected." In addition, MacDrive keeps telling me Windows cannot modify a MacDrive volume.
Help?

 

[Hellhammer]

Did you select MS-DOS as the format? Can the MacDrive format the OS X partition? If so, format the 700GB back to HFS+ and then turn that into NTFS with MacDrive

 

[typeadam]

MacDrive can't format just one partition - it's the entire drive or nothing.

 

[-tWv-]

Ok what i would do is first download and install ntfs-3g. This utility will prove useful in the future of using your external hard drive because it allows read/write capability to ntfs formatted drives with a mac. This will also allow you to format disks to ntfs with disk utility on the mac.

Then after you have that installed, go into disk utility and select your disk and go under "partition". The under volume scheme change it from "current" to "2 partitions." This will set up two new partitions which you will then format.

Click on the first one, name it, and make the size 700GB for your NTFS drive. Then under the format drop down menu, select "Windows NT File System (NTFS-3G)". Now move on to the second partition

** See attached for what the disk utility screen should look like and the "Windows NT Filesystem" settings is highlighted

The second partition should already be sized to around 300GB because it is just using the remaining space of the drive after taking out 700GB for the other partition. Name this partition, and format it as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)."

After you have made sure all the settings are correct for each partition, hit "apply" at the bottom and after a while you should have the partitions you wanted

If that doesn't work, then just format the NTFS section as "free space" and then use the Windows Vista/7 Disk Management utility to format it as NTFS.

 

[-tWv-]

So basically what I want is 2 partitions - 700GB NTFS, 300GB HSF+
I'm not looking for an alternate or a "work-around," I'm looking for that.

But your alternate or workaround that I think would be 10 times easier is just to download ntfs-3g (allows NTFS read/write on mac) and format the entire drive as NTFS (either with the Vista utility or with disk utility; either will work). That way you will be able to have all your stuff in one place, with the ability to edit files from both mac and PC, and avoid the complications with partitions.

Just a Suggestion

 

[typeadam]

But your alternate or workaround that I think would be 10 times easier is just to download ntfs-3g (allows NTFS read/write on mac) and format the entire drive as NTFS (either with the Vista utility or with disk utility; either will work). That way you will be able to have all your stuff in one place, with the ability to edit files from both mac and PC, and avoid the complications with partitions.

Just a Suggestion

I will try your suggestion in the previous post and report back a little later. As far as the workaround, sometimes I bring my drive to other computers (Macs/PCs) which aren't mine and I can't really ask people "oh can you install MacDrive" or "can you install NTFS3G." And because of my work I tend to move around various computers with huge video files for editing so FAT32 won't work either.
Ideally, I would format the entire thing in HFS+ b/c the transfer speeds between the drive and Macs would be very quick and then I could use MacDrive on my Windows machines. But like I said I just around computers a lot.
But I will give your first post a shot and let you know how it went. Thank you.

 

[-tWv-]

Ok cool let me know if that worked. If it doesn't I can try to help you sort through the problems but its a pretty simple process so hopefully it will work with no problems.