USB drives, multiple filesystems/partitions & interoperability

[wrldwzrd89]

I'm having trouble with getting Windows to understand the partition structure of my USB drive. I formatted it into 3 partitions: One HFS+, the second FAT, and the third also FAT. For some odd reason, though, Windows refuses to recognize the FAT partitions and mount them, ignoring the HFS+ partition it doesn't recognize in the process. Instead, what it's doing is mounting only the FIRST partition on the drive, ignoring anything else there - even if said partition is the GPT protective partition. I'm understandably baffled by this.

The reason I'm doing this is to make a "universal" development drive. I tried formatting the whole drive as FAT, which sort of works (my IDE loads from the drive okay, but refuses to update itself, complaining that the profile is in use, only tested on the Mac side). So, I came up with what I thought was the brilliant idea of mixed filesystem partitioning to work around the issue... but of course that doesn't work either.

For the curious: I'm trying to load & run Eclipse 3.5.2 from my flash drive. I can unpack Eclipse from its archive, and run it from the drive... but when I try to install plugins, that's when it complains. I wish to put 4 versions of Eclipse on the same drive - Carbon 32-bit, Cocoa 64-bit, Win32 and Win64... the version that I've tested, and the one that's giving me grief, is the Cocoa 64-bit one.

 

[satcomer]

If you own the Windows box forget bending OS X to Microsoft and make your Windows box be able to read HFS+ formats with MacDrive. This way you don't have to format disks to share with Windows.

Before you ask Microsoft will not release the NTFS specs to anyone to write to NTFS formatted drive. There are third party OS X applications that work. mostly though with NTFS.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Thanks for the suggestion. However, I'll be using this on Windows systems I own as well as ones I do not, so that's not really a viable option.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Just had a brainwave for how to solve this problem. Tried my idea, and... lo and behold, it worked! It's a 64GB flash drive, so... I figured, instead of making 3 partitions, make 2 with Windows's partition first on the drive, and have the Windows partition be approximately double the size of the Mac partition. That works perfectly - Windows recognizes the FAT32 partition and mounts it, ignoring the HFS+ partition it doesn't understand. Mac OS X detects and mounts both partitions.

 

[vansouza]

Yes Grasshopper you discovered the path to enlightenment... if Win OS/MSDOS can not see the first partition it will see none of them... the FAT one must be first... thanks for posting the solution.