GPT or MBR for 2nd drive? (bootcamp on 1st drive)

[sneak3]

Hi gents!

1st SSD is for OSs, both OSX and Windows 7.
2nd SSD will be shared between the 2 OSs, formatted in NTFS, for data/storage only.

So 2 questions:

1- Should I format the 2nd SSD within OS X with TUXERA built-in NTFS tool or in Windows 7?

2- Should I use MBR or GPT on it?

Cheers!

 

[sneak3]

220 views! I can't believe everybody here is clueless about this issue. I thought it was common knowledge for tech people

 

[Weaselboy]

Hi gents!

1st SSD is for OSs, both OSX and Windows 7.
2nd SSD will be shared between the 2 OSs, formatted in NTFS, for data/storage only.

So 2 questions:

1- Should I format the 2nd SSD within OS X with TUXERA built-in NTFS tool or in Windows 7?

2- Should I use MBR or GPT on it?

Cheers!

1. Doesn't matter. Same end result is a NTFS formatted drive.

2. GPT.

 

[sneak3]

1. Doesn't matter. Same end result is a NTFS formatted drive.

2. GPT.

Alright, I'll do it in Windows 7 just in case.

And why exactly GPT? I thought Win 7 "liked" MBR more and OS X was capable of reading MBR as well.

 

[Weaselboy]

Alright, I'll do it in Windows 7 just in case.

And why exactly GPT? I thought Win 7 "liked" MBR more and OS X was capable of reading MBR as well.

GPT stands for GUID Partition Table. Pretty good overview on wiki here.

Windows did use MBR on older BIOS motherboards. But GUID allows larger drive sizes and works with newer EFI (replaced BIOS) motherboards. This varies by Windows version. If you look toward the bottom of that wiki page it shows what is supported by different OS versions.

Ordinarily, it only comes into play on a boot drive. If you are not booting from the drive and are just using it for external storage it does not come into play much.

 

[sneak3]

GPT stands for GUID Partition Table. Pretty good overview on wiki here.

Windows did use MBR on older BIOS motherboards. But GUID allows larger drive sizes and works with newer EFI (replaced BIOS) motherboards. This varies by Windows version. If you look toward the bottom of that wiki page it shows what is supported by different OS versions.

Ordinarily, it only comes into play on a boot drive. If you are not booting from the drive and are just using it for external storage it does not come into play much.

If I use the built-in windows 7 disk management for formatting, can I still choose GPT or for GPT it has to be done on the OS X side?

 

[Weaselboy]

If I use the built-in windows 7 disk management for formatting, can I still choose GPT or for GPT it has to be done on the OS X side?

Yes, you can use Win 7 to select GPT. When you go to format the drive you will get a popup like this.

 

[sneak3]

Hey, so formatted the 2nd one on windows side, GPT, ntfs

However sinetimes, after a restart on OSX side, the 2nd drive will unmount. Does that have to do with GPT/MBR or maybe even with HFS/NTFS?
This solved my questionThis helped me

 

[Weaselboy]

Hey, so formatted the 2nd one on windows side, GPT, ntfs

However sinetimes, after a restart on OSX side, the 2nd drive will unmount. Does that have to do with GPT/MBR or maybe even with HFS/NTFS?

Dunno... OS X can read from NTFS so it should mount. I know people have been having odd disk mounting issues with Mavericks.

 

[sneak3]

Weird. It only happened once so far. Maybe it's Tuxera/Paragon that did something wrong.

So just to be clear, I should NOT use bootcamp to format the 2nd drive if Im not installing windows on it, right? It's alright to use the built-in utility in windows?

 

[Weaselboy]

Weird. It only happened once so far. Maybe it's Tuxera/Paragon that did something wrong.

So just to be clear, I should NOT use bootcamp to format the 2nd drive if Im not installing windows on it, right? It's alright to use the built-in utility in windows?

Just use the built in Windows utility.

 

[sneak3]

Just use the built in Windows utility.

I use that tool and apparently it created a "windows reserved" partition, size 120 mb.

Is that supposed to happen? If I used MBR would I get the same result?

 

[Weaselboy]

I use that tool and apparently it created a "windows reserved" partition, size 120 mb.

Is that supposed to happen? If I used MBR would I get the same result?

Yes, that is the windows boot manager and would be used if you were booting from the drive. Either format would do that and it is normal.