how do I make a os extended partition on an NTFS drive (external) ???

[pixeltarian]

so I have about 60 gigs free on my windows 320GB external. It is currently NTFS formatted. Is there a way I can allocate some of that free space to function as a mac formatted drive.

I've tried googling this for a long time and all I can find is the reverse of what I want to do.

my specs/capabilities:
I 24 inch imac bought new this month.
(which is supposed to translate as: 10.5.6, 4GB of ram, 2.66GHz core 2 duo)

I have the whole fuse thing working, but disk management won't give me the format option...

is there a program for this? or some kind of tricky business I need to do?

thanks in advance,

- the [p]iXelTaRian

 

[pixeltarian]

i guess nobody knows...
maybe it can't be done. I guess mac's just aren't all that good ay?

 

[GilGrissom]

You might want to give people more time to respond. They're are some really clever and helpful people here (not counting myself there, I just do what I can!)

I've had a quick look at my own disk set up in Disk Utility and I can't alter my NTFS partition on my drive without deleting it first, but then again it is my BootCamp partition so Disk Utility knows this and it may be stopping me because of that, I'm not sure. I don't know enough about NTFS to know if it is simply a limitation of NTFS, I know it can be very restricting given its nature to be more secure and closed.

I would give iPartition a go, it's a very useful piece of software which lets you create a bootable CD which can then do wondrous things to your disks and partitions which, if you're careful, can often be done in a none-destructive manner. Ie: without deleting a partition.

This may be worth a shot, no guarantee it will work though, may be someone else has more insight and information on this, but this is what I'd check personally.

 

[BobZune]

I don't have a spare drive to experiment at this time, but what happens if you try to format it with disk utility to HFS+ ? [Even if it formats, note you might not be able to BOOT the Mac from that partition, assuming it has the MBR partition table.]

See also https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/650927/ for some hints. Before experimenting with partition table changes, back up the data on the disk to a safe location. GUID (aka GPT) partition scheme may work for both machines, but you'd have to format the NTFS partition on the Windows machine.

Here's a compatibility draft -- somewhat dated and may not be accurate, but may help.