I have three drives in my Mac. The 1 250 it came with and two 500GBs. I installed XP on the 250. Can I store Windows-related files on the other two hard drives or do they need to be formatted for Windows-only or anything weird like that?
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Using the secondary hard drive...
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CanadaRAM
macrumors G5
You need to have at least one partition formatted MS-DOS (FAT32) if you want to put Windows files on it and share them with OSX
Some instructions here for formatting a drive with both HFS+ and FAT32
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030613121738812
Some instructions here for formatting a drive with both HFS+ and FAT32
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030613121738812
So I'm assuming HFS+ is the Mac standard. But doesn't FAT32 limit you to 32GB? I have two 500GB internal drives I want to use. Also, I formatted XP as NTFS.
CanadaRAM
macrumors G5
Windows artificially limits FAT32 formatting to 32 Gb per volume as a way to force people to use NTFS. The Mac (and third party formatting tools) can format a FAT32 drive to any size.
Read the linked article through to the end.
(disclaimer - I have NOT done this myself)
That article is pretty daunting and a bit over my head. This is the only way? What is my other option, to make the drive Windows-only?