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Create Partition to work with both Windows and Mac

P

philbagg

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 24, 2010
19
0
I have an iMac with a 230gb hard drive, and I've just used boot camp to create a 50gb partition for windows, all seems to be going smoothly enough.

Now, I'd like to be able to take a good chunk of the remaining hard disk space and create a partition that will work between mac osx and windows.

At the moment:
Mac OSX partition = 180gb
Windows = 50gb

I'd like to make a partition (about 120gb) from the mac osx side, and label it "audio drive" (i use audio software and i'd like to run the data on a separate location to the software).

How can I do this in such a way that both OSX and Windows XP will recognise the "drive" or partition? Im assuming I'll have to use Fat32, however Disk Utility won't give me that option (not that I can see anyway)

Thanks in advance.

Edit: The OS's are Leopard and XP Service Pack 3
 
Mac OS X calls FAT32 MS-DOS in Disk Utility.

You can also use MacDrive to read and write HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) via Windows, or NTFS-3G to write to NTFS (Windows) formatted volumes.

Hd_02.jpg



http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems
 
spinnerlys said:
Mac OS X calls FAT32 MS-DOS in Disk Utility.

You can also use MacDrive to read and write HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) via Windows, or NTFS-3G to write to NTFS (Windows) formatted volumes.

Hd_02.jpg



http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems
Click to expand...

Thanks spinnerlys, it's much appreciated :D

I created another partition from OSX, but when I booted into XP I got the blue screen of death :mad:

I think it might be to do with when I first started boot camp, and I already had a partition on the Macintosh HD. It told me I couldn't make a Windows partition on a drive that was already split :rolleyes:

But I'm giving that MacDrive a test run atm, I think I might buy it and run my data off the 180GB Macintosh HD partition while running my Windows software off the XP drive.

Cheers :)
 
Hi!
I have just ordered an i7 MBP. I need to use Windows quite a lot, and have both 32-bits and 64-bits versions of Win 7 Ultimate available. I believe I will go for the 32-bits version on it's own partition (Bootcamp), as I understand it's easier regarding drivers.

I also want to create a third partition on the 500GB HD that should be readable/writeable from both OSX and Win7. I understand that FAT32 will be needed, and that's OK, as it will mainly contain pictures and music that I would like to access/store from both OS's.

So the real question is:
In what sequence should I do things to make it successful? Should I make a the FAT32 partition before or after I install Win7? The MBP will of course be brand new with only what Apple have installed on the drive. Will I need some special tools for this, or could it be done with the tools provided in OSX and/or Win7?

Sorry if this might seem like newbie questions. I have experience with PPC Macs, but I'm a newbie to Intel Macs.

Thanks for reading.
Tom
 
TommieG said:
Hi!
I have just ordered an i7 MBP. I need to use Windows quite a lot, and have both 32-bits and 64-bits versions of Win 7 Ultimate available. I believe I will go for the 32-bits version on it's own partition (Bootcamp), as I understand it's easier regarding drivers.

I also want to create a third partition on the 500GB HD that should be readable/writeable from both OSX and Win7. I understand that FAT32 will be needed, and that's OK, as it will mainly contain pictures and music that I would like to access/store from both OS's.

So the real question is:
In what sequence should I do things to make it successful? Should I make a the FAT32 partition before or after I install Win7? The MBP will of course be brand new with only what Apple have installed on the drive. Will I need some special tools for this, or could it be done with the tools provided in OSX and/or Win7?

Sorry if this might seem like newbie questions. I have experience with PPC Macs, but I'm a newbie to Intel Macs.

Thanks for reading.
Tom
Click to expand...

So I guess this isn't possible on a MacBook Pro, then?

Tom
 
TommieG said:
Hi!
I have just ordered an i7 MBP. I need to use Windows quite a lot, and have both 32-bits and 64-bits versions of Win 7 Ultimate available. I believe I will go for the 32-bits version on it's own partition (Bootcamp), as I understand it's easier regarding drivers.

I also want to create a third partition on the 500GB HD that should be readable/writeable from both OSX and Win7. I understand that FAT32 will be needed, and that's OK, as it will mainly contain pictures and music that I would like to access/store from both OS's.

So the real question is:
In what sequence should I do things to make it successful? Should I make a the FAT32 partition before or after I install Win7? The MBP will of course be brand new with only what Apple have installed on the drive. Will I need some special tools for this, or could it be done with the tools provided in OSX and/or Win7?

Sorry if this might seem like newbie questions. I have experience with PPC Macs, but I'm a newbie to Intel Macs.

Thanks for reading.
Tom
Click to expand...

Once you create a partition for Windows, you can't create another partition on the same drive AFAIK. Boot camp doesn't like it. You can however get some software called "MacDrive" that allows windows to see Apple-Formatted drives. This can allow you to view your Mac drives files in Windows, but I'm not sure about viewing your windows drives files from OSX.
 
Just to warn you all,

Windows XP and newer won't format FAT32 larger than 32 GB, so you have to use OS X to format a larger partition as FAT32. (OS X's partition utilities are better than Windows, anyway.)

And both Windows and OS X are slower dealing with FAT32 drives than with their "native" formats (NTFS and HFS+, respectively.) The speed hit isn't horrendous for internal drives, but for some reason, the overhead of an external drives produces a noticeable speed hit. I originally had a FireWire 800 RAID-0 drive (aka: faster access than FW800's 100MB/s should be capable of,) formatted as FAT32, and it was too slow to capture HD video. I reformatted HFS+, and it's plenty fast now.
 
Just an update.
I got my MBP today, followed the instructions and it went very smooth. I now have a OSX partition, a Win7 partition and a Data partition that is readable/writeable from both OS's.

Thanks a million!

Tom
 
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