Third partition in Lion

[tillsbury]

Hi, I'm getting completely stuck trying to create a working third partition on a rMBP for use in both Windows and OSX. All the information I come across on the internet seems to apply only to old versions of OSX.

As far as I can see, Bootcamp will only allow windows installation on a clean single-partition OSX system. If I shrink the OSX partition and create a new one the Bootcamp won't work.

Other messages suggest installing third-party programs either to read Mac drives on Windows or vice versa. I'd really rather not do this, most appear to be only partially supported, or refer to old versions of OSX, and the one that did claim to work (MacDrive) in this situation installed and appeared to work but corrupts data on the OSX partition and is terribly slow. Fortunately that was a trial version and I had a backup of the data.

I'd really rather find something that was properly supported within each OS, and that would appear to be exFAT. But creating a third exFAT partition isn't supported by Bootcamp as far as I can see (without using a third-party fudge).

What's the recommended, simple way to do this? Or isn't there one?

I have a 600Gb OSX partition and 150Gb Windows 7 NTFS partition. I'd like to make a 50Gb or so shared partition, for read/write data, out of spare space on either partition. Should I perhaps wait for ML to provide a better Bootcamp implementation?

 

[vistadude]

I followed this guide to make a third FAT32 partition with snow leopard and xp, then i upgraded xp to windows 7. The questions is whether you need bootcamp drivers in XP, because if I remember correctly, you can't see the mac partition in windows without the bootcamp drivers, or was that the ability to read from the mac partition. If you don't need the bootcamp drivers, you could easily install XP, do the boot edit, and then do a clean install of windows 7.

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/246/114


Btw, my macbook has been running nearly 3 years without corruption using this method, and I have full read/write access to the 3rd data partition in both OS's.

 

[tillsbury]

Yes, I saw that. But it's so old it references Snow Leopard and Windows XP (!). So it talks about a FAT32 partition. Windows 7 certainly doesn't use the same boot structure as Windows XP, and Bootcamp under Lion is different too. And they both can use exFAT drives, which looks like it's the go. But that fudge certainly isn't going to work on current software.

What I need is the current way of doing it.... if there is one...

 

[vistadude]

These two methods reportedly work but seem far more experimental with deleting partitions.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3293948

http://forums.macworld.com/index.ph...setup-os-x-lion-bootcamp-win7-data-partition/


I still think the XP version will work, without the bootcamp drivers, then do a clean install of windows 7 on top of that. It doesn't matter that you want ex-fat vs fat, you can always format the data partition with any type of volume afterwards.

 

[tillsbury]

Hmm. Thanks for the links. I've seen those and they do (as you say) look very experimental indeed. I don't like Windows 7 installations over XP as they can be flawed too.

It sounds to me from the messages on the net as if Macs just can't do this properly right now, but it might be that there is something new in Bootcamp under ML, so let's see what happens tomorrow...