Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Partitioning external for windows/mac backups, not boot

R

rosh325

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 13, 2007
169
0
In the ether
Hi all, thanks in advance for the read.

I am new to Mac and am looking to use time machine with an external hard drive. My girlfriend has a huge seagate external hdd and uses a program which creates very small backup images on this hard drive. Here is what I would like to do:

Partition the hard drive such that there are two partitions, one for the windows machine to back up to (NTFS) and one for the mac to backup to (HFS+).

Please note, the windows machine does NOT need to access the mac part and vice versa.

I understand that there is a program called MacDrive that will let me just keep the whole drive mac formatted, but I'd rather not do that. Instead, I would like two separate partitions so that time machine doesn't try to overstep its boundaries.

How would I go about doing this? (what program etc)
Thanks in advance and let me know if you need more info.
 
All you will need to make the partitions is disk utility is OS X. Though you may have to look for something else if you actually need to format to NTFS to support files over 4GB.
 
Thanks for the fast reply. Just to clarify, I'd like the windows partition to work just like a normal windows hard drive. Write normal files etc (though the only files will be backup files).

How would this work in disk utility?

Thanks
 
So just to clarify, could I do the following:

1. Format the drive in windows, making a NTFS partition for the windows machine to back up to
2. Leave the other half-ish of the drive unformated
3. Hook the drive up to my mac and use disk utility to turn that unformated part into HFS+

Thanks for the help. When I run time machine for the first time, will it mess around with these partitions?

Thanks again
 
You may also use disk utility in OS X and do:
1. Select Drive in question.
2. Go to partition table
3. Adjust it to one part of the drive is HFS+ and the other as Free Space
4. Click the Partition button when you are done.

Then go to windows and format the free space to NTFS

Hope that helps
 
Hi I'm back.

So another quick related question: Any ideas on how to format the free space into NTFS in XP?

Thanks again
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back