Ok, so I'm looking to use a single external hard drive to use as a backup for my files between my two laptops. One MBP, one Dell. I need some help with how to partition the drives correctly. I will be moving files over 4GB, so FAT32 is not an option, plus the drive will be at least 500GB, and I know FAT32 sometimes has issues when partitioned that large. So FAT32 is out. What I'm looking to do is have half of the drive formatted to NTFS, and half formatted to HSF+. I have a little 2GB thumbdrive I've been trying to do it on, but no luck... Can someone detail the steps I need to follow to make this happen? Thanks.
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Dual Partitioning a Hard Drive
- Thread starter dharasick
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What I've got working right now is NTFS-3G installed, giving me support for NTFS on my Mac. What I could do is just partition a gig or so on the new hard drive with the program just in case I need to have the drive read on another macbook. But I still would like to accomplish my original problem.
Just leave the whole drive as one NTFS partition. Any Mac running OS X 10.3 or later can read NTFS-formatted partitions.
Open Disk Utility.
Find the first mention of your external HDD in the left pane.
Click that, and go to the "Partition" tab.
Select "2 Partitions" from the drop down menu.
Give each partition a snazzy name.
Make the first partition Mac OS Extended Journaled. Make the second FAT32.
Click apply.
Take the HDD to your Windows machine and do the following:
Open "Computer" in an Explorer window.
Right-click the FAT32 partition and say Format.
Format as NTFS.
Find the first mention of your external HDD in the left pane.
Click that, and go to the "Partition" tab.
Select "2 Partitions" from the drop down menu.
Give each partition a snazzy name.
Make the first partition Mac OS Extended Journaled. Make the second FAT32.
Click apply.
Take the HDD to your Windows machine and do the following:
Open "Computer" in an Explorer window.
Right-click the FAT32 partition and say Format.
Format as NTFS.
I don't want read-only privileges. That's not an option for me...
I tried that, but it wasn't working for me. It would somehow mess up the HSF+ partition, and when I would plug it back into the mac, it wouldn't read/display both of them...
It would only be read-only on a computer without NTFS-3G installed. With NTFS-3G installer, full read and write support is possible.
Windows can't read HFS+. Just format the FAT32 one. I've got mine setup just like I described.
Redo the whole thing and then do the partitioning in Windows, making one NTFS and leave the other alone. Then use Disk Utility and make that other partition HFS+.