Use same partition on osx and windows?

[Freyqq]

It works without a third party bootloader. I've done it. It took probably 2-3 tries to get the right things formatted at the right time in the process to make Windows happy, but it is possible.

Edit: to be fair, I did it under windows 7 with snow leopard, which afaik did not create a recovery partition. Apparently it is still possible but you may have to delete the recovery partition before installing windows. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3293948?start=0. Or maybe it is all different now with windows 8, sounds like a challenge....

To further explain, I tried to make it work with OSX 10.9, Windows 8.1, and a third 5 gb exfat partition. Making the 5 gb exfat partition made the bootloader not see Windows at all, forcing me to redo the whole SSD. My research concluded that a 3rd party bootloader could get it to work, but i couldn't find a good walkthrough and it wasn't worth the trial and error to figure it out.

As discussed in your article, I made the partition change after Windows was installed. Maybe that was my problem. However, I used windows' tools to shrink the bootcamp partition and make the exfat partition.


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Thanks everyone for the suggestions and help, I really appreciate it.

Since this will be a new computer with no personal files on it, I don't mind trying this setup a couple times, if I have to reinstall OSX then I don't lose anything except a bit of time. If it works, great, if it doesn't well at least I tried and I'll put everthing on an external disk and be done with it.

And yes, I will be doing backups daily.

And typing that I have a question that pops to mind. Is there a way to do a total disk backup. What I mean is, in windows I'll be able to do a backup of the windows partition (and maybe data partition), and in mac I'll be able to do mac backup. That's two operations to back everything up. Is there a way to do a full hdd backup regardless of OS and file types and such in only one operation?

It's not the end of the world if this is not possible. I'll do a backup of one OS partition a night, and the other partition on the other night which is still good.

I ended up splitting the backup hard drive into two partitions (HFS and NTFS) and have it automatically back up every hour based on whichever I am booted into. Seems like the easiest strategy.

 

[steveyo]

I got this work without any mods

My notes
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1850357/

 

[austinpike]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1850357/

Nice work, thanks for documenting it!