How to you partition an external hard drive into FAT 32?

[Cedar Hawk]

Edit: Doh. Sorry, that's "How to partition. . ." I'm in rather a rush, sorry for the random additional word.

Hi, I do hope that I posted into the correct section. My problem is thus...

Recently I bought a Mac OS X Leopard, which comes with the Bootcamp. I have the XP operating disk, and Virtual Box, which is another program like Bootcamp. Instead of the bootcamp way of rebooting every time you switch between operating systems, Virtual Box allows both systems to run simultaneously.

Instead of taking up space on my hard drive, I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent (Desk Edition) 1TB external drive.

I need to partition this drive in two, to allow the combined running of PC and Mac OS X using Virtual Box. The formats I will be using are FAT 32 and Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The latter is very easy, as I can simply do this on the Mac.

However, the FAT 32... Since I am splitting the external hard drive in two, my XP PC cannot create a partition using FAT 32 which is greater than 32GB, and if I create the F32 partition using the Mac it won't be recognized by the PC operating system.

So, my condensed question is: is there any way to create a FAT32 partition on an external hard drive which is greater than 32GB?

 

[priller]

and if I create the F32 partition using the Mac it won't be recognized by the PC operating system.

Both my external hd's have a fat32 partition made with osx, vista & xp see them fine.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Sure- just go into Disk Utility, make two partitions and in the "Format:" section enter "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" for the first partition and "MS-DOS (FAT)" for the second one (which is the Mac terminology for FAT32).

 

[Tox]

Thanks for this info. Can I check if there are any items that need to be manually placed in either the FAT32 side or the Mac Journaled side to allow for smooth running when I set up the drive? I am buying a new WD 1TB ext HD and need to do a lot of video transfer between Mac and drive, but also transfer docs to PC and back.... I have had a plethora of issues with FAT32s freaking out and not working, so don't want to endanger my files....
Thanks in advance.

 

[MisterMe]

.... I have had a plethora of issues with FAT32s freaking out and not working, so don't want to endanger my files....
Thanks in advance.

Then don't use FAT32.