Multi partition setup for Boot Camp, Fusion

[AZBigBear]

Just purchased a Mac Pro (my first Mac after being a long time PC user) and need some advice for carving up the disk partitions to run some other operating systems on an additional 500GB Seagate HDD.

I want to run Windows XP on a 100GB partition of the Seagate drive and use the addition space, about 380GB, to run Solaris and Linux for work specific simulation programs via VMware Fusion. I know I could run some Linux programs on OSX, but I’m trying to keep work and personal data completely separate.

I installed XP using Boot Camp with no problem on the 100GB partition and left the rest of the disk as Free Space.

My problem is getting the Free Space partitioned so I can use it to host the other OS’s running VMware Fusion. When I use the disk utility to partition the rest of the disk, it goes into “Modifying Partition Map” and hangs. I left it on all night and it didn’t finish.

Is there an easy way to make the 380GB left on the Seagate drive usable for the OSX or do I need to do something different? I’d like to avoid re-doing the Boot Camp\Windows layout since everything is working great on that side.

Any suggestions? THX.

 

[AZBigBear]

Fixed it

Found the problem. I tried to partition using the default, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) method. When I changed it to Mac OS Extended without being Journaled, everything worked fine. Now I'm able to put the VM's in the extended partition and run Boot Camp on its own 100GB partition.