how do you partition free space in OS X?

[pesos]

dual-booting OS X and winXP on my core solo mini.

I have a 10 gig partition for each, leaving me roughly 35 gigs of free unused space on the drive.

I created a primary fat32 partition using the windows disk management tool, however once i reboot the partition seems to have been deleted.

So I figured I would try creating the partition using OS X, however there seems to be no way to do this that I can find. The cd-based disk utility seems to only be able to wipe the drive and start from scratch to partition (pretty useless) and running diskpart from the terminal doesn't seem to have any options to achieve this either.

am i crazy? can there really be no way to just set up a friggin partition using unused space in OS X?

thanks for your help!
Wes

 

[idea_hamster]

I think you're going to have to redo your HD -- and here's why:

When you partitioned your drive, I think that you chose "free space" as the format for this missing partition.

"Free space" is not writable blank space. It is completely unformatted and generally not recognized by OSX (or other systems). The only time I ever used this was to create a partition for Linux -- and the Linux installer (Yellow Dog) formatted that partition. (Actually, it subdivided it into smaller partitions that it then formatted, which is why it needed to be free space to start with.)

If you want OSX on one partition, XP on another, and a third partition for storage (why? just curious...) then you need to set a format for that third partition when you set up the disk.

Sorry if this is bad news
but it could be worse, right?

 

[pesos]

actually, OS X is the only OS I have ever used that does not let you work with free space. windows easily lets you go in and partition/format free space -- in this case that partition works just great until I reboot and then i guess perhaps the xom.efi bootloader is killing it?

i want the extra space as a fat32 partition to have my mp3s and other files accessible to both operating systems...