formatting external hard drive with two different partition schemes?

[limsilas]

hi all,

i'd like to format my lacie external hard drive with two partitions:

1. HFS+ partition as a bootable clone of my internal drive
2. FAT32 partition readable by any windows (and mac) machine

i'm creating my partitions with disk utility, but i hit a snag when choosing a partition scheme...apparently i cannot choose a different scheme for each partition.

so when i format the drive with GUID, the FAT32 partition is not even recognized by windows XP. but when i format the drive with master boot record (MBR), the HFS+ partition is not bootable...

i achieved this on my prior external hard drive, but cannot remember how. any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

 

[limsilas]

anyone have any ideas? i know this is possible because i had my prior external drive setup this way, i just cannot remember how.

 

[mulo]

not possible

 

[al2o3cr]

It sounds like you're looking for a hybrid GPT setup. This looks promising:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html

BTW, why FAT32 instead of NTFS? The NTFS-3G drivers for OSX have been solid for a while now, and pretty much any version of Windows that's not positively ancient should be able to read it - and you don't have to worry about hitting the 2 gig limit in the old FAT system.

 

[limsilas]

BTW, why FAT32 instead of NTFS?

thanks for the link! although i haven't totally read through it yet, because it looks kind of complicated. i wish i can remember how i setup my old external hard drive - it was a few years ago, and it wasn't complicated at all. i wonder if disk utility in leopard somehow made this type of thing easier?

also, i'm sticking with FAT32 so that my friends' macbooks can read the drive - none of them have NTFS (even though i do).