Best performance for cross platform external drive

[bradz_id]

Hi,

I am getting an external FireWire/USB 2 80GB hard drive. It will be used to transfer quite a lot of data from mac to PC and vica versa. I also want to be able to boot my Mac from it to run TechTool Pro.

I am thinking I'll have partitions like this:

30GB Mac OS Extended (journalled) for mac to mac and booting mac
30GB NTFS for PC to PC and PC to Mac
20GB FAT32 for Mac to PC

Good idea or not?

 

[Tomaz]

I want to do the exact same thing! Your partition suggestions sound good to me.
Can you please tell me how you are planning to do this? I tried to partition my HD using the Osx built in "Drive Manager" or whatever it's called. But this tool only lets me format a complete hard drive to MS-DOS format, as soon as I want to make several partitions I can only choose between Mac OS Extended (journaled or not) and some UNIX filesystem.

So what's the trick ??

 

[bradz_id]

Partition it on a Mac with all mac partitions then re-format the partitions you want on Windows. I am hoping this wil work. Otherwise I'll partition it in Windows then re-partition one to Mac OS Extended in OS X. I'm 90% sure one of those will work.

 

[Tomaz]

Partition it on a Mac with all mac partitions then re-format the partitions you want on Windows. I am hoping this wil work. Otherwise I'll partition it in Windows then re-partition one to Mac OS Extended in OS X. I'm 90% sure one of those will work.

I don't think it's all that easy. Osx seems to have problems to recognize Mac partitions when other partitions (FAT..) are present. It looks like manual mounting is necessary everytime the drive is connected. There are also some other problems.

Check this thread:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030613121738812