Mac - PC partition external Hard Drive

[Eibbor]

Hi guys.

I just bought a 250gb Maxtor 7,200rpm 8mb cache internal hard drive. I also bought an external case, to make it an external hard drive. It has 2 firewire ports, and I want to partition it to have 150gb for my Mac, and 100gb for my PC. I have absolutely no idea what so ever, of how to go about doing that. Can you please send me a step by step guide to do this?


Thanks
Eibbor

B.T.W I am using WindowsXP and Mac OS 10.2.8.

 

[DavidLeblond]

I'm not sure, but I think if you format the whole thing as PC the Mac should be able to read it just fine.

Thats formatted as FAT, not NTFS. Not sure how well that will work.

Anyway, if you still want to partition it, you can do it on the PC using fdisk.

 

[Eibbor]

I don't know how to format a FAT partition. When i try, it only lets make a NTFS partition, and from what i hear, MAC's cant run it...

 

[MrSugar]

yeah, mac can read NTFS partitions now with Panther but you can't write to them. I don't understand this because in the windows world NTFS is essential, you would think mac would try to accommodate. I have an external 80 and have to 'read only' on the mac... kind of annoynig

 

[Tetra]

I ran into this same problem. I'm (for a few months more anyways) a windows user. Running XP, you can't format to Fat32. However, using a friend's powerbook, I was able to.

Open up "Disk Utility"(?) and choose to format the drive to PC- Fat. Writes it to Fat32, which both OS's can read/write to.

Good luck, sorry if my nomenclature is off, I'm still learning OSX in 15 minutes a day, whenever I can grab a powerbook at school. Heh.


Tetra