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btownguy

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 18, 2009
545
19
Here's what I want to do. I have a 1.5 Tb external USB drive that I want to use with both my MacBook Pro and my soon-to-be Windows 7 desktop PC. I want to make image backups of both systems onto this external drive. For Windows, I'll use a boot CD with Acronis TruImage. For the Mac, I'll use SuperDuper!

I've been playing around with partitioning this drive so that I can accomplish both of these goals and I'm a bit stumped. I was able to get a two partitions created - one for Windows (NTFS) and one for Mac (HFS+), and at first look they appear to work fine. However, there appear to be two problems:

1) When I look at the disk in Windows Disk Administrator, there are two smaller "hidden" partitions that I did not create. I think they were created with the Mac formatted its partition.

2) When I boot my Windows computer with the Acronis TruImage CD (and have the external drive plugged in to USB), the Acronis software doesn't see the external drive. When I boot into Windows, the drive is there and accessible.

So, I can deal with problem #1 if those hidden partitions are necessary for the Mac. However, I really need to resolve problem #2. My initial guess is that it can't see the drive because when I partitioned the drive on the Mac, I did not choose "Master Boot Record", rather, I chose the one for Intel-based Macs.

So...any ideas?
 
You are using GUID Partition Table (GPT) then. See http://kb.acronis.com/content/2974

[In case the page goes away, here's a summary: Acronis True Image Home does not support dynamic disks or disks with GUID partition tables (GPT) ... Acronis True Image Home does not support dynamic disks or disks with GUID partition tables (GPT) ... Acronis True Image Echo and Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 support dynamic and GPT disks.]
 
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