External Harddrive Partitioning

[weatherman316]

I currently have a 320 GB external hdd (not big enough, I know). As of now, it has two NTFS partitions (both of which only have about 50 GB of space left on them). In preparation of my upcoming purchase of a MBP I'd like to organize and repartition this external drive which will be used for backing up. As soon as I get my MBP I'll be partitioning the internal drive with boot camp so I'll have three partitions:
1. OS X (main partition)
2. Windows XP (smaller, around 30 GB, mainly for gaming and a few applications)
3. FAT 32 (to be able to share documents between them)

So, ideally what I think I'd like to do is to have three partitions for this external drive:
1. OS X (what does OS X use to backup?) - I'll be backing up the MBP to this periodically.
2. Media Backup (How would I set this up to be able to say put all my music and movies on the hdd from my windows pc and then move them onto my MBP?) - I'd like to keep a copy of all my music, movies, pictures, etc. on this drive.
3. Windows XP (NTFS) - I'd also like to keep a copy of my Windows stuff on this drive so I don't have to put it all onto the bootcamp partition.

So, long story short, how do I accomplish this?

 

[weatherman316]

Bump.

I've moved the files from one NTFS partition to the other and deleted that partition. Currently, I'm partitioning a FAT32 partition from the unallocated space. I still need answers to 1 and 2 below, primarily 2. Also, is there anyway for me to format a partition for OS X now or do I have to wait until I get my MBP?

1. OS X (what does OS X use to backup?) - I'll be backing up the MBP to this periodically.
2. Media Backup (How would I set this up to be able to say put all my music and movies on the hdd from my windows pc and then move them onto my MBP?) - I'd like to keep a copy of all my music, movies, pictures, etc. on this drive.

 

[merl1n]

Bump.

I've moved the files from one NTFS partition to the other and deleted that partition. Currently, I'm partitioning a FAT32 partition from the unallocated space. I still need answers to 1 and 2 below, primarily 2. Also, is there anyway for me to format a partition for OS X now or do I have to wait until I get my MBP?

1. OS X (what does OS X use to backup?) - I'll be backing up the MBP to this periodically.
2. Media Backup (How would I set this up to be able to say put all my music and movies on the hdd from my windows pc and then move them onto my MBP?) - I'd like to keep a copy of all my music, movies, pictures, etc. on this drive.

1. Time Machine but you will need an external drive for this.
2. As long as you are using FAT32 for your Windows partition you should be able to copy the files to your Mac Partition as long as they 4GB or smaller. You do this while booted from the MacOS.
2a. If your Windows partition is NTFS, you can still do #2 from the MacOS. MacOS can read NTFS, but not write to it.

 

[weatherman316]

1. Time Machine but you will need an external drive for this.
2. As long as you are using FAT32 for your Windows partition you should be able to copy the files to your Mac Partition as long as they 4GB or smaller. You do this while booted from the MacOS.
2a. If your Windows partition is NTFS, you can still do #2 from the MacOS. MacOS can read NTFS, but not write to it.

1. So if I leave a partition unallocated on my external hdd I can just use Time Machine to format it and back up to it from OS X?

2/2a. Okay, so I can just create an NTFS partition that's like 100GB to store my music, movies, etc. and move them onto my MBP, I just can't move stuff I download on my MBP back on to that partition, to do so would require a FAT32 partition?

2b. Is it possible to move files between NTFS and FAT32? Meaning, if I have my FAT32 partition to read and write from both Mac OS and Windows, would I be able to say move a file from that partition to another drive that's NTFS?

 

[merl1n]

1. So if I leave a partition unallocated on my external hdd I can just use Time Machine to format it and back up to it from OS X?

2/2a. Okay, so I can just create an NTFS partition that's like 100GB to store my music, movies, etc. and move them onto my MBP, I just can't move stuff I download on my MBP back on to that partition, to do so would require a FAT32 partition?

2b. Is it possible to move files between NTFS and FAT32? Meaning, if I have my FAT32 partition to read and write from both Mac OS and Windows, would I be able to say move a file from that partition to another drive that's NTFS?

1. But you'll need a very large drive. You should allow 3x the size of your internal Mac partition for TM backups. I believe that TM backs up your entire computer (I don't use boot camp), all partitions so you may not have to partition the external drive at all. Make sure you change the external drive partition map to GUID or you will have major problems.

2. I can't answer that. I don't use boot camp. I use Virtual Machines (Windows XP and Solaris) thru VMware Fusion. With this setup, I have shared folders to transfer files back and forth between my VMs and Mac.