Can I Partition an External HD for multiple formats

Discussion in 'Mac Basics and Help' started by Saladsamurai, Dec 9, 2009.

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  1. Saladsamurai, Dec 9, 2009

    Saladsamurai macrumors regular

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2009
    #1
    Hello there :) Perhaps this is a stupid question, I am not a computer whiz by any means.

    I just got a Western Digital Passport external HD. I am going to be running both Windows and OS X on my MBP. I am only using the WD Hard Drive for backup purposes. I was hoping that I could partition it into 2 drives: one for my windows machines and one for my MBP.

    So I would need one drive as NTFS (I would be transferring files >4GB so I think FAT32 is out) and one drive Mac journal.

    Any thoughts on this?

    Thanks,
    Casey
     
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  2. zachsilvey, Dec 9, 2009

    zachsilvey macrumors 6502

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    Battle Ground
    #2
    It's really easy, just open Disk Utility and go to the "Partition" tab and partition it into two one HFS+ and one FAT32. Then in Windows reformat the FAT32 partition to NTFS (as OS X doesn't have native support for it).

    A second option is a third party NTFS plug-in for OS X that would allow you to both read and write to a NTFS partition. Like NTFS-3G http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
     
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  3. Saladsamurai, Dec 10, 2009

    Saladsamurai thread starter macrumors regular

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    Dec 8, 2009
    #3
    Ok great! I will give this a shot after work. Thanks for your time :)
     
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